[1] There are innumerable English synonyms for psychasthenic, mostly
slang. A few are unbalanced, half-crazy, half-cracked, half-dotty,
peculiar, queer, etc. But none of these expresses the exact meaning of
the Greek; indeed, it is impossible absolutely to escape from medical
jargon, except by a phrase.
[2] Probably it was the clinical type with stupor, in which grief and the
sense of sin become so overwhelming that the patient can hardly move.
[3] According to Professor J. J. Welsh many ointments in use at the time
contained mercury.
[4] In cases resembling nymphomania that occur after childbirth we call
it puerperal insanity.
[5] The title was only recent. Formerly he had been called “His Grace.”
[6] See how neurotic he was at the time!
[7] Please note that “sex” does _not_ mean “sensuality.”
[8] These postulates are:
(_a_) Her supposed deformity must have been such as would allow
her terrible father and her anxious mother to accept her as a
daughter, although they both desperately longed for a son and
heir.
(_b_) It must have been such as would have been known to
herself.
(_c_) It could not have interfered with the ordinary
physiological processes of her life.
(_d_) It must have been such as would not interfere with her
living in at least tolerable health to the age of sixty-nine.
[9] If it is a science.
[10] Please do not look upon this as a diagnosis; all we say positively
is that the spirochæte must have affected his mind.
[11] _British Medical Journal_, 1910.
[12] Some say sixteen.
[13] Much the same libels on Catherine’s physical condition were spread
about her as had already been said about Elizabeth.
[14] Macaulay makes such fun of the poor doctors, with many sensational
adjectives, but I shall not reprint it here.
[15] A Freudian would say that Frederick’s dirtiness simply represented
an unconscious revolt against the tyranny of his father.
[16] Probably he was some crazy fellow of the minor clergy. The whole
world seems to have gone mad at this time; it only shows us what the
Crusades really meant to Europe.
[17] _Plague and Pestilence in Art and Literature_, by Raymond Crawfurd.
[18] Friedlander, taking his account of it entirely from Galen,
considered it to have been “petechial typhus,” or smallpox. The sanitary
condition of Rome must have been perfectly frightful, and to read
Friedlander makes one shudder.
[19] Probably Mus Rattus, the black rat, at that time. Mus decumanus, the
brown rat, does not seem to have begun to conquer the black rat till the
eighteenth century.
[20] _Epidemics of the Middle Ages._
[21] Of course this mainly refers to the poor. It is said that the serfs
deforested Europe in order that their betters might have a weekly hot
bath.
[22] The question of the first appearance of syphilis in Europe appears
to have been settled by an article in the _St. Louis Urological and
Cutaneous Review_ for 1924.
[23] Probably, like so many leaders of thought, Nietzsche was of the
manic-depressive temperament, with all the apparently insane egotism of
that temperament.
[24] It reminds one of Beethoven and the rice pudding, and of Henry VIII
and his loving subjects. But, whereas Henry, being a law-abiding, even
though impetuous, sovereign, was able to satisfy his obsessions by due
process of law, Schopenhauer and Beethoven had to take the matter into
their own forthright hands. And yet they say that the world did not
improve in those 300 years.
[25] Probably he was thinking of gonorrhœal ophthalmia, and dreading
lest he catch it by the unconventional way of a bath. No doubt somebody
had warned him against the dangers of the towel. He was full of quaint
ideas about infection. He must have walked in a maze of ghosts due to his
syphilophobia.
[26] I hate to remind the world of the ancient slander—
A woman, a dog, and a crab-apple tree,
The more you thrash ’em the better they be.
[27] Similarly Freud’s use of the term “sex” has been much misunderstood.
It does not mean sensuality. In man it has been so sublimated as to come
nearer to pity and love than to mere brute instinct.
[28] So far as we know we invariably become unconscious before we die; it
seems to be exactly like falling asleep.
[29] Or rather perhaps the infinite forces of the universe _as grasped by
the mind of man_.
[30] Of course because religion and science have nothing whatever to do
with each other. Religion is an emotion comparable to pity and love—that
is, to sex. Science is the observation of phenomena, which religion
sometimes unwisely tries to solve by transcendental explanations.