Of Middlesex, aged fifty-four years, and admitted on the 18th May
1820. The mind of this wretched man, at his advanced years, had become
the victim of a most singular, though unfounded notion, that he had
had an unnatural connexion ----: and so fully was he persuaded of
this fact, and so horrified at his imaginary guilt, that no power of
persuasion could convince him to the contrary, or abate the miseries of
his remorseful conscience. His constant exclamation, while under this
delirium, was “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I shall certainly go to hell,
and be burnt alive for ever.” He imagined the coppers in the kitchen
were prepared to boil him, the oven to bake him, and the fires to roast
him; that every vessel of water, though but a bucket-full, was intended
to drown him; that the heavens were tumbling down on him; that every
razor he saw was to cut his throat, every knife to dissect him, and
all the workmen’s saws and hatchets to cut him asunder; their chissels,
gimlets, awls, and nails to pierce him; their mallets and hammers to
beat out his brains, their ropes and lines to hang him. He expected
every moment that he was to be torn to pieces, and devoured by dogs,
tigers, lions, wolves, bears; that the houses would fall on him, and
the earth open and swallow him up. When the least noise disturbed him,
he would exclaim, with marked terror, “Oh, Heavens! here they come! oh,
what shall I do? where shall I run? how shall I hide myself?”
His distracted fancy constantly pictured the supposed object to his
vision, and he would exclaim, with closed and elevated hands, in a
despondent tone: “Oh, you detested brute, I wish to God I had never
seen you! Curse you! you have been my ruin and destruction, you
hateful, ill-looking, lean old devil: Oh, dear me! dear me! what shall
I do?” He believed all the meat served up to the dinner-table was
horse-flesh, and the beef in the peas-soup to be the flesh of dead men,
cut up and boiled in it, for crimes like his own.
He remained twelve months in this hospital in this deplorable
condition, and was ultimately discharged incurable. He had a wife and
children; and, to aggravate his misery, if possible, when he returned
to his parish he found that his faithless wife had increased his
family by a young child about a month old; and, what was still worse,
that the father of this child, was his own brother!!
Poor Baker was to others a harmless and inoffensive man, though a most
deplorable object of pity, and incapable of any relief or abatement of
the horrors of his distracted mind.