VAGARIES OF THE BRAIN.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4794, 3 August 1876, Page 3

VAGARIES OF THE BRAIN.

(From Chambers' Journal) Hallucinations and dreams are effects of a disturbed brain. A famous portrait painter who was in the habit, of painting some 300 portraits every year was able to call up the features of his sitters so vividly that he never required more than half-an-hour for his subject in the flesh, being able, after that short " sitting," to fill a vacant chair with the creature of his brain, and thence transfer it to canvas. This wonderful power eventually resulted in insanity. Another patient who could place himself before his own eyes, and laugh and argue with his double, became at last so miserable that he shot himßelf. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, numbers of persons in France and Germany were possessed by a peculiar hallucination known as lycanthropy. Imagining that they had become wolves, they left their homes for the forests, and there leading the lives of wild beasts became so ferocious as even to devour children; Three of these werwolves, as they were called, on the confession of such horrors, were burnt alive at Besancon in 1521. On dreaming, it is perhaps startling to be assured that it is so akin to insanity as to be, distinguished from it only by the absence of volition, while in the case of the somnambulist there is not even this point of difference. A story is given of a somnambulist monk, who, dreaming that the prior had killed his mother, went to his superior's bedside and stabbed the clothes (happily unoccupied) through to the mattress. Sometimes a person determined to destroy himself will wait months and years for an opportunity of executing the deed in_ the particular manner hd has marked out for himself, and the very inclination to suicide may be'removed by withdrawing the practical object that would awaken the idea. Thus a man who has tried to drown himself will be under no temptation to cut his throat. Example, it is well known, is a powerful cause of incitement to the suicidal act. We were onco told by a physician that a hypochondriacal patient used to visit him invariably the day after reading the report of a suicide in the daily papers, possessed by a morbid fear of imitating the act which he read. Sir Charles Bell, surgeon of Middlesex Hospital, was one day describing to a barber who was shaving him a patient's unsuccessful attempt to cut his own throat ; and, on the barber's request, pointed out the anatomy of the neck, showing how easily the act might have been accomplished. Before the shaving operation was completed, the barber had loft the shop, and cut his throat according to Sir Charles Bell's exact instructions. Sometimes there is an epidemic of suicides, as at Versailles, in 1793, when out of a small population 1300 persons destroyed themselves in one year ; or as in tho Hotel des Invalidea in Paris, when six of tho inmates hanged themselves on a certain cross-bar within a fort-

night." Very jb ; and,; "at 'a' certain, age - the members -hj one family will all in tiirn'v evince the suicidal ten-" dency, while even . f children ■, of very ; yeavs have been known to end their,short lives by their own act, fpm, force, of example/. . ;.,-,;