A stroke of personal ridicule is levelled at Dryden, when Bayes informs
us of his preparations for a course of study by a course of medicine!
"When I have a grand design," says he, "I ever take physic and let
blood; for when you would have pure swiftness of thought, and fiery
flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part; in fine,
you must purge the belly!" Such was really the practice of the poet, as
Le Motte, who was a physician, informs us, and in his medical character
did not perceive that ridicule in the subject which the wits and most
readers unquestionably have enjoyed. The wits here were as cruel against
truth as against Dryden; for we must still consider this practice, to
use their own words, as "an excellent recipe for writing." Among other
philosophers, one of the most famous disputants of antiquity, Carneades,
was accustomed to take copious doses of white hellebore, a great
aperient, as a preparation to refute the dogmas of the stoics. "The
thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a
dose of salts; but one can't take them like champagne," said Lord Byron.
Dryden's practice was neither whimsical nor peculiar to the poet; he was
of a full habit, and, no doubt, had often found by experience the
beneficial effects without being aware of the cause, which is nothing
less than the reciprocal influence of mind and body.
This simple fact is, indeed, connected with one of the most important
inquiries in the history of man--the laws which regulate the invisible
union of the soul with the body: in a word, the inscrutable mystery of
our being!--a secret, but an undoubted intercourse, which probably must
ever elude our perceptions. The combination of metaphysics with physics
has only been productive of the wildest fairy tales among philosophers:
with one party the soul seems to pass away in its last puff of air,
while man seems to perish in "dust to dust;" the other as successfully
gets rid of our bodies altogether, by denying the existence of matter.
We are not certain that mind and matter are distinct existences, since
the one may be only a modification of the other; however this great
mystery be imagined, we shall find with Dr. Gregory, in his lectures "on
the duties and qualifications of a physician," that it forms an equally
necessary inquiry in the sciences of _morals_ and of _medicine_.
Whether we consider the vulgar distinction of mind and body as an union,
or as a modified existence, no philosopher denies that a reciprocal
action takes place between our moral and physical condition. Of these
sympathies, like many other mysteries of nature, the cause remains
occult, while the effects are obvious. This close, yet inscrutable
association, this concealed correspondence of parts seemingly
unconnected, in a word, this reciprocal influence of the mind and the
body, has long fixed the attention of medical and metaphysical
inquirers; the one having the care of our exterior organization, the
other that of the interior. Can we conceive the mysterious inhabitant as
forming a part of its own habitation? The tenant and the house are so
inseparable, that in striking at any part of the dwelling, you
inevitably reach the dweller. If the mind be disordered, we may often
look for its seat in some corporeal derangement. Often are our thoughts
disturbed by a strange irritability, which we do not even pretend to
account for. This state of the body, called the _fidgets_, is a disorder
to which the ladies are particularly liable. A physician of my
acquaintance was earnestly entreated by a female patient to give a name
to her unknown complaints; this he found no difficulty to do, as he is a
sturdy asserter of the materiality of our nature; he declared that her
disorder was atmospherical. It was the disorder of her frame under damp
weather, which was reacting on her mind; and physical means, by
operating on her body, might be applied to restore her to her half-lost
senses. Our imagination is higher when our stomach is not overloaded; in
spring than in winter; in solitude than amidst company; and in an
obscured light than in the blaze and heat of the noon. In all these
cases the body is evidently acted on, and re-acts on the mind. Sometimes
our dreams present us with images of our restlessness, till we recollect
that the seat of our brain may perhaps lie in our stomach, rather than
on the pineal gland of Descartes; and that the most artificial logic to
make us somewhat reasonable, may be swallowed with "the blue pill." Our
domestic happiness often depends on the state of our biliary and
digestive organs, and the little disturbances of conjugal life may be
more efficaciously cured by the physician than by the moralist; for a
sermon misapplied will never act so directly as a sharp medicine. The
learned Gaubius, an eminent professor of medicine at Leyden, who called
himself "professor of the passions," gives the case of a lady of too
inflammable a constitution, whom her husband, unknown to herself, had
gradually reduced to a model of decorum, by phlebotomy. Her complexion,
indeed, lost the roses, which some, perhaps, had too wantonly admired
for the repose of her conjugal physician.
The art of curing moral disorders by corporeal means has not yet been
brought into general practice, although it is probable that some quiet
sages of medicine have made use of it on some occasions. The Leyden
professor we have just alluded to, delivered at the university a
discourse "on the management and cure of the disorders of the mind by
application to the body." Descartes conjectured, that as the mind seems
so dependent on the disposition of the bodily organs, if any means can
be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than they have been
hitherto, such a method might be sought from the assistance of
_medicine_. The sciences of Morals and of Medicine will therefore be
found to have a more intimate connexion than has been suspected. Plato
thought that a man must have natural dispositions towards virtue to
become virtuous; that it cannot be educated--you cannot make a bad man a
good man; which he ascribes to the evil dispositions of the _body_, as
well as to a bad education.
There are, unquestionably, constitutional moral disorders; some
good-tempered but passionate persons have acknowledged, that they cannot
avoid those temporary fits to which they are liable, and which, they
say, they always suffered "from a child." If they arise from too great a
fulness of blood, is it not cruel to upbraid rather than to cure them,
which might easily be done by taking away their redundant humours, and
thus quieting the most passionate man alive? A moral patient, who allows
his brain to be disordered by the fumes of liquor, instead of being
suffered to be a ridiculous being, might have opiates prescribed; for in
laying him asleep as soon as possible, you remove the cause of his
sudden madness. There are crimes for which men are hanged, but of which
they might easily have been cured by physical means. Persons out of
their senses with love, by throwing themselves into a river, and being
dragged out nearly lifeless, have recovered their senses, and lost their
bewildering passion. Submersion is discovered to be a cure for some
mental disorders, by altering the state of the body, as Van Helmont
notices, "was happily practised in England." With the circumstance to
which this sage of chemistry alludes, I am unacquainted; but this
extraordinary practice was certainly known to the Italians; for in one
of the tales of the Poggio we find a mad doctor of Milan, who was
celebrated for curing lunatics and demoniacs in a certain time. His
practice consisted in placing them in a great high-walled court-yard, in
the midst of which there was a deep well full of water, cold as ice.
When a demoniac was brought to this physician, he had the patient bound
to a pillar in the well, till the water ascended to the knees, or
higher, and even to the neck, as he deemed their malady required. In
their bodily pain they appear to have forgot their melancholy; thus by
the terrors of the repetition of cold water, a man appears to have been
frightened into his senses! A physician has informed me of a remarkable
case; a lady with a disordered mind, resolved on death, and swallowed
much more than half a pint of laudanum; she closed her curtains in the
evening, took a farewell of her attendants, and flattered herself she
should never awaken from her sleep. In the morning, however,
notwithstanding this incredible dose, she awoke in the agonies of death.
By the usual means she was enabled to get rid of the poison she had so
largely taken, and not only recovered her life, but, what is more
extraordinary, her perfect senses! The physician conjectures that it was
the influence of her disordered mind over her body which prevented this
vast quantity of laudanum from its usual action by terminating in
death.[299]
Moral vices or infirmities, which originate in the state of the body,
may be cured by topical applications. Precepts and ethics in such cases,
if they seem to produce a momentary cure, have only moved the weeds,
whose roots lie in the soil. It is only by changing the soil itself that
we can eradicate these evils. The senses are five porches for the
physician to enter into the mind, to keep it in repair. By altering the
state of the body, we are changing that of the mind, whenever the
defects of the mind depend on those of the organization. The mind, or
soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited,
independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body. A
man becomes stupified when the circulation of the blood is impeded in
the _viscera_; he acts more from instinct than reflection; the nervous
fibres are too relaxed or too tense, and he finds a difficulty in moving
them; if you heighten his sensations, you awaken new ideas in this
stupid being; and as we cure the stupid by increasing his sensibility,
we may believe that a more vivacious fancy may be promised to those who
possess one, when the mind and the body play together in one harmonious
accord. Prescribe the bath, frictions, and fomentations, and though it
seems a round-about way, you get at the brains by his feet. A literary
man, from long sedentary habits, could not overcome his fits of
melancholy, till his physician doubled his daily quantity of wine; and
the learned Henry Stephens, after a severe ague, had such a disgust of
books, the most beloved objects of his whole life, that the very thought
of them excited terror for a considerable time. It is evident that the
state of the body often indicates that of the mind. Insanity itself
often results from some disorder in the human machine. "What is this
MIND, of which men appear so vain?" exclaims Flechier. "If considered
according to its nature it is a fire which sickness and an accident most
sensibly puts out; it is a delicate temperament, which soon grows
disordered; a happy conformation of organs, which wear out; a
combination and a certain motion of the spirits, which exhaust
themselves; it is the most lively and the most subtile part of the soul,
which seems to grow old with the BODY."
It is not wonderful that some have attributed such virtues to their
system of _diet_, if it has been found productive of certain effects on
the human body. Cornaro perhaps imagined more than he experienced; but
Apollonius Tyaneus, when he had the credit of holding an intercourse
with the devil, by his presumed gift of prophecy, defended himself from
the accusation by attributing his clear and prescient views of things to
the light aliments he lived on, never indulging in a variety of food.
"This mode of life has produced such a perspicuity in my ideas, that I
see as in a glass things past and future." We may, therefore, agree with
Bayes, that "for a sonnet to Amanda, and the like, stewed prunes only"
might be sufficient; but for "a grand design," nothing less than a more
formal and formidable dose.
Camus, a French physician, who combined literature with science, the
author of "Abdeker, or the Art of Cosmetics," which he discovered in
exercise and temperance, produced another fanciful work, written in
1753, "La Médecine de l'Esprit." His conjectural cases are at least as
numerous as his more positive facts; for he is not wanting in
imagination. He assures us, that having reflected on the physical
causes, which, by differently modifying the body, varied also the
dispositions of the mind, he was convinced that by employing these
different causes, or by imitating their powers by art, we might, by
means purely mechanical, affect the human mind, and correct the
infirmities of the understanding and the will. He considered this
principle only as the aurora of a brighter day. The great difficulty to
overcome was to find out a method to root out the defects, or the
diseases of the soul, in the same manner as physicians cure a fluxion
from the lungs, a dysentery, a dropsy, and all other infirmities, which
seem only to attack the body. This indeed, he says, is enlarging the
domain of medicine, by showing how the functions of intellect and the
springs of volition are mechanical. The movements and passions of the
soul, formerly restricted to abstract reasonings, are by this system
reduced to simple ideas. Insisting that material causes force the soul
and body to act together, the defects of the intellectual operations
depend on those of the organisation, which may be altered or destroyed
by physical causes; and he properly adds, that we are to consider that
the soul is material, while existing in matter, because it is operated
on by matter. Such is the theory of "La Médecine de l'Esprit," which,
though physicians will never quote, may perhaps contain some facts worth
their attention.
Camus's two little volumes seem to have been preceded by a medical
discourse delivered in the academy of Dijon in 1748, where the moralist
compares the infirmities and vices of the mind to parallel diseases of
the body. We may safely consider some infirmities and passions of the
mind as diseases, and could they be treated as we do the bodily ones, to
which they bear an affinity, this would be the great triumph of "morals
and medicine." The passion of avarice resembles the thirst of dropsical
patients; that of envy is a slow wasting fever; love is often frenzy,
and capricious and sudden restlessness, epileptic fits. There are moral
disorders which at times spread like epidemical maladies through towns,
and countries, and even nations. There are hereditary vices and
infirmities transmitted from the parent's mind, as there are
unquestionably such diseases of the body: the son of a father of a hot
and irritable temperament inherits the same quickness and warmth; a
daughter is often the counterpart of her mother. Morality, could it be
treated medicinally, would require its prescriptions, as all diseases
have their specific remedies; the great secret is perhaps discovered by
Camus--that of _operating on the mind by means of the body_.
A recent writer seems to have been struck by these curious analogies.
Mr. Haslam, in his work on "Sound Mind," says p. 90, "There seems to be
a considerable similarity between the morbid state of the instruments of
voluntary motion (that is, the _body_), and certain affections of the
mental powers (that is, the _mind_). Thus, _paralysis_ has its
counterpart in _the defects of recollection_, where the utmost endeavour
to remember is ineffectually exerted. _Tremor_ may be compared with
_incapability of fixing the attention_, and this _involuntary state of
muscles_ ordinarily subjected to the will, also finds a parallel where
the mind loses its influence in the train of thought, and becomes
subject to spontaneous intrusions; as may be exemplified in _reveries_,
_dreaming_, and some species of _madness_."
Thus one philosopher discovers the analogies of the mind with the body,
and another of the body with the mind. Can we now hesitate to believe
that such analogies exist--and, advancing one step farther, trace in
this reciprocal influence that a part of the soul is the body, as the
body becomes a part of the soul? The most important truth remains
undivulged, and ever will in this mental pharmacy; but none is more
clear than that which led to the view of this subject, that in this
mutual intercourse of body and mind the superior is often governed by
the inferior; others think the mind is more wilfully outrageous than the
body. Plutarch, in his essays, has a familiar illustration, which he
borrows from some philosopher more ancient than himself:--"Should the
body sue the mind before a court of judicature for damages, it would be
found that the mind would prove to have been a ruinous tenant to its
landlord." The sage of Cheronæa did not foresee the hint of Descartes
and the discovery of Camus, that by medicine we may alleviate or remove
the diseases of the mind; a practice which indeed has not yet been
pursued by physicians, though the moralists have been often struck by
the close analogies of the MIND with the BODY! A work by the learned Dom
Pernetty, _La connoissance de l'homme moral par celle de l'homme
physique_, we are told is more fortunate in its title than its
execution; probably it is one of the many attempts to develope this
imperfect and obscured truth, which hereafter may become more obvious,
and be universally comprehended.