THE DELUSIONS OF THE INSANE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1116, 9 June 1883, Page 3

THE DELUSIONS OF THE INSANE.

Three strange cases of hypochondria came into the dispensary in Thirty-fourth street for treatment on one day. John Wilson wanted his brains taken out, washed, and put in again. Another man, whose name is Bark, was under the impression that he had no stomach. “ Then where does the medicine go that I give you?” asked the doctor. “ I don’t know, but not into my stomach. I think it must lodge in the spine.” Dr. Hammond, of the Post Graduate Medical School, treated a man who is haunted by a most singular delusion. For the past eight months this patient has imagined that his left ear is growing to an enormous size. He brought with him a diary of more than two hundred pages, in which ho had recorded almost hourly, and sometimes every ten minutes, the state of his case. One paragraph runs:—“Monday morning, 9 o’clock. Went upstairs to measure it again. My God, its growing visibly ! I am not a man ; I am an elephant. To-morrow 1 shall have the lug of Jumbo.” Ten minutes after he made this entry “ Took another look at it. Very much larger. When somebody spoke outside I saw it prick up like that of a hound,” A number of religious outbursts followed this discovery. Nearly a month later he recorded a fresh impression. “My powers of hearing increase with the size. Last night 1 caught the tones of several Chinamen talking on the Pacific Slope, and though a storm was raging in the Rocky Mountains I could tell what they said. When a man gets to the base of sounds he can understand all languages.”—New York Herald.