From Margate, aged twenty-one, admitted March 14th, 1822. This young
man’s first symptoms of insanity were discovered from his eating
candles, starch, chalk, and other trash, and drinking urine wherever
he could come at it. He is cheerful and harmless, but vain of his
universal qualifications. According to his own account, he was the
handsomest boy in all Margate; and can dance, sing, swim, and do many
other feats, to admiration. He appears to have been bred to the sea;
vaunts much of his skill and seamanship, and performed a voyage to the
East-Indies and back, in a fortnight. He imagines himself still on
board ship. The gallery floors he calls the deck, the windows are the
port-holes. When ordered into the airing ground, he terms it “going on
shore;” and when ordered up, he calls it “going on board again.” Any
questions put to him he sometimes answers with smartness, and sometimes
with wit or shrewdness, but, in general, is rather silly.
Shortly after his admission, he stood one day in the stone sink under
the pump; but on the approach of one of the governors, he jumped
down. The governor, seeing him a new patient, kindly asked him how
he was, and where he came from? Brown returned the civility of the
first inquiry, and pointing to the sink said he came from that. “Aye,
but,” replied the governor, “where did you come from originally?” His
answer was, “from my mother: and where did you come from?” The governor
declined to continue the conversation.