Aged thirty-nine, admitted 28th November 1822. This man was a gardener
at Northampton, and had been disordered several months. His derangement
commenced with a strong notion that he was to fall the victim of
poison, administered by some persons having a design upon his life: and
so strong was this impression on his deluded mind, that for a long time
he took his food, of whatever it consisted, with extreme caution, and
marked suspicion; but during three months preceding his transmission
to this hospital, he refused all other sustenance but milk alone, and
subsisted entirely on this. When he rose from bed every morning he
was taken to a meadow near his residence, and furnished with a stool,
on which he sat till bed-time. His daily allowance was a can of milk,
which was brought to him every morning, and thus provided, he mused
the whole day, in a melancholy solitude, utterly careless of his
person, and every thing around him. During the whole three months of
this meadowed retirement he was neither shaved nor washed; and when
presented for admission here, he came with all his filthy appendages
thick upon him, more like some non-descript species of the brute
creation than a human being. A long beard enveloped the lower parts of
his face, and the rest of it was clothed with dirt of various kinds and
colours; his head projecting forward, his body bent almost double, his
whole frame feeble and tottering, his steps timid and cautious, his eye
sharp, scowling, and inquisitive, and his utterance suppressed almost
to dumbness. He presented altogether the character of some curious wild
animal, better suited for the menagerie at Exeter-Change than for the
class of human beings; and, under a new name, might have been viewed as
a species of the ourang-outang, and have become an attractive object to
the curious in natural history.
The poor fellow, on his entrance here, was impressed with strong fears
that he was brought for the purpose of being killed; and, under this
notion, he earnestly begged that as he was a poor, weakly object, they
would not put him to a very lingering or tormenting death. But, what
is extremely singular in the result of his removal here, as a place of
proper treatment, that no sooner was his person cleansed from filth,
and his squalid apparel changed for comfortable clothing, than a
visible abatement of his disorder commenced. From the second day after
his admission he took his food without the slightest symptom of doubt
or apprehension; he became comparatively cheerful, assumed a contented
aspect, and his fear of being murdered quite vanished: and in seven
days’ time there appeared a most extraordinary change in his whole
manners, health, habits, and opinions: a change perhaps unparalleled
within so short a period, in the whole annals of insanity. He has
latterly imbibed the extraordinary notion of his being filled with
frogs, and that all the food he takes goes to their support.