THEIR PREVENTION.

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eased in the present state of physiological knowledge and practice. For those who are afflicted with maladies to be deprived of marriage and its joys is indeed a bitter pill, but far more bitter the loss of children. Diseased subjects can endure celibacy with much less pain than they can bury children or a companion. Better bear thine own bitter lot alone than still further embitter the lives of companions and children, and those to whom they may have become attached. Though we have just proved that it is possible for the children of diseased parents to live and become healthy, yet this rarely occurs, and cannot be expected except where the conditions of health are thoroughly known and rigidly practiced. This is extremely rare; and I therefore solemnly warn all who are hereditarily pre-disposed to any disease, never, on any account, to marry UNTIL they have thoroughly investigated the laws of health, and brought themselves to the solemn determination to to enforce them practically on themselves and their children. Indeed, these laws are but very imperfectly known, even by our best authors. The KEY of health has been developed in only a single work within the author's knowledge. Physiological science is yet in its merest infancy-too infantile to warrant the marriage of those hereditarily diseased to any great extent. To all PRACTICAL intents and purposes, therefore, the author virtually revokes that matrimonial latitude just given, and reiterates his former doctrines, and the popular injunction that those predisposed, hereditarily, to disease, should NOT MARRY, or marrying, abstain from propagating.

Readers may accuse me, with some show of propriety, of affirming that diseases are hereditary, and then that they are not; and of granting the largest matrimonial liberty, and then of revoking that license; yet those who bring this accusation have not comprehended the true tenor and spirit of our arguNo one interpretation of nature yet given has been revoked or contradicted, but every position taken has been sustained by an order and amount of proof absolutely irresistible. We have shown that a liability or exposure to disease, rather than an actually diseased condition, is transmissible, yet that such liability can be obviated and disease staved off; but

ments.

added that few understand physiology or self-government sufficiently to do it. All seeming contradiction springs from nature's perfection on the one hand, or man's physiological imperfection on the other. Man is untrue to nature, but she is always true to herself, and not represented, in these pages, as at war with herself. Moderate intellectual acumen will discern both our general interpretation of hereditary inferences and also those specific qualifications here appended, without discovering the least contradiction.

341.

PROSPECTIVE PARENTS SHOULD PRESERVE HEALTH.

We

This great moral inferance is powerfully enforced by several of our positions, one of which is, that, for children to attain longevity, their parents must both possess this condition, and also TAKE CARE of their health 321. We have also shown that parents, though from a healthy stock, can INDUCE diseases by abusing their health, and then transmit these diseases. Indeed, this was the primitive origin of all diseases. Man was healthy at first. But repeated abuse of health brings on various maladies, which these hereditary laws transmit. have also seen that families often "RUN OUT," and, in all probability, the great majority of infected families run out in a few generations ; yet these diseases increase because individuals are perpetually contracting, and then transmitting them. Any prospective parent, however healthy originally, may, by exposing him or herself to severe colds, induce lung affections; and this done, will, of course, transmit this affection to posterity. Still, such children can obviate these temporary diseases much more easily than those transmitted for several generations.

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In selecting conjugal companions, then, it is not enough that they be free from all hereditary taints. They must also have PRESERVED the constitution they inherited. In fact, those somewhat invalid-so much so that they have been compelled to husband their health-are generally able to endure more, and parent better children, than the majority of those who have always been robust; because, nineteen out of every twenty of such, utterly insensible of the value of health, have shame

INSANITY TRANSMITTED.

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fully abused it, and nearly broken down, yet are insensible of its cause, and still as reckless as ever. The summary of this whole matter is simply this: SELECT HEALTHY COMPANIONS, and let all prospective parents ASSIDUOUSLY PRESERVE

HEALTH.

SECTION III.

INSANITY HEREDITARY.

342. MADNESS THE WORST OF MALADIES.

J

HUMANITY Commiserates those blooming youth cut down by fatal consumption just as they are entering upon the threshhold of life's hopes and pleasures. We instinctively pity that miserable wreck of humanity who is pierced with the pains, and racked with the ulcers of malignant scrofula and cancer. But, of all other victims of disease and objects of pity, among the wretched millions on our globe, those are most to be pitied, because the most completely wretched, whose REASON is dethroned, and whose MINDS are wrecked. Yet these maladies are frequent-quite as numerous as any other sickness. Governmental and private institutions, for the amelioration and restoration of lunatics, are therefore among the most humane, as well as necessary, erected by modern benevolence. He who, in a fit of bewildered frenzy, can lay violent hands on his own life, because his malady renders that life so intolerably wretched, must indeed be tortured with perpetual agony, and deserve both human sympathy and aid a 235 282 ; and those insane asylums are both saving many from suicidal death, and restoring half their inmates to themselves, their families, and their enjoyments.

More insane patients, by far, walk our streets, and throng the public concourse, than are confined in our asylums; and a large proportion of those incarcerated in our prisons belong, of right, to the mad-house 8 210 This malady assumes all gradations, from the most violent ravings of the infuriated maniac, to the slightest idiosyncrasies or aberrations, often called ec

centricities and peculiarities, yet are in fact departures from right reason.

Nor is derangement confined to one form of mental alienation, but distorts and perverts every faculty of the human mind, from its normal to abnormal or deranged action® 2

343. CONDITIONS OF INSANITY TRANSMITTED.

8 208

Though its effects are mental, yet its cause is always purely PHYSICAL. It indeed alienates the mind, yet its seat is in the BRAIN-that acknowledged organ of the mentality. And it consists, without any exception, in the diseased condition and action of the brain and nervous systems 210. This is universally conceded. Dr. Rush-high medical authority-discusses the cause and seat of insanity as follows:

"Madness has been placed exclusively in the mind. I object to this opinion-1. Because the mind is incapable of any operations independently of impressions communicated to it through the medium of the body. 2. Because there are but two instances upon record of the brain being found free from morbid appearances in persons who have died of madness. One of these instances is related by Dr. Stark; the other by Dr. Haen. They probably arose from the brain being diseased beyond that grade in which inflammation and its usual consequences take place. Did cases of madness reside exclusively in the mind, a sound state of the brain ought to occur after nearly every death from that disease. I object to it, 3. Because there are no instances of primary affections of the mind, such as grief, love, anger, or despair, producing madness until they had induced some obvious changes in the bodysuch as wakefulness, a full or frequent pulse, costiveness, a dry skin, and other symptoms of bodily indisposition."-RUSH on the Mind, p. 16.

Insanity is still more conclusively proved to be caused solely by cerebral disease, by its being so often cured by restorative agents applied to the brain. But this point is too apparent and generally admitted to require elaborate argumentation. All who know anything of this matter know that it is caused solely by CEREBRAL INFLAMMATION, and can be cured by reducing this its sole cause.

We have adduced and proved insanity to appertain to the brain mainly as evidence that it is hereditary. We have shown that the physiology is hereditary-the form of the body,

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and all its physical conditions; and that these conditions of strength and debility, sluggishness and activity, and every other physical state, are transmitted. Does not this same law, then, transmit preternatural cerebral action? Does not that law, which has been shown to transmit being, size, stomatic, optical, cutaneous, muscular, and other bodily conditions and affections, also transmit both the brain and its various states of health and disease? What prevents? How can it be otherwise? But hear Dr. Rush's continuation :

"My reasons for believing the cause of madness to be seated in the blood-vessels of the brain are drawn

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"I. From its remote and exciting causes, many of which are the same with those which induce fever and certain diseases of the brain, particularly phrenitis, apoplexy, palsy, and epilepsy, all of which are admitted to have their seats in the blood-vessels. Of thirty-six dissections of the brains of persons who died of madness, Mr. Pinel says he could perceive no difference between the morbid appearances in them, and in the brains of persons who died of plexy and epilepsy. The sameness of these appearances, however, do not prove that all those diseases occupy the same part of the brain: I believe they do not, especially in the first stage. They become diffused over the whole brain, probably in their last stages, or in the paroxysm of death. Dr. Johnson, of Exeter, in speaking of the diseases of the abdominal viscera, mentions their sympathy with each other, by what he very happily calls an intercommunion of sensation.' It would seem as if a similar intercommunion took place between all the diseases of the brain. It is remarkable they all discover, in every part of the brain, marks of a morbid state of the blood-vessels.

"II. From the ages and constitutions of persons who are most subject to madness. The former are in those years in which acute and inflammatory arterial diseases usually affect the body, and the latter in persons who labor under the arterial predisposition.

"III. I infer that madness is seated in the blood-vessels

"1. From its symptoms. These are a sense of fulness, and sometimes pain in the head; wakefulness, and a redness of the eyes, such as precede fever; a whitish tongue, a dry or moist skin, high-colored urine, a frequent, full, or tense pulse, or a pulse morbidly slow or unnatural as to frequency. These states of the pulse occur uniformly in recent madness, and one of them (that is, frequency) is seldom absent in its chronic state.

"I have taken notice of the presence of this symptom in my introductory lecture upon the Study of Medical Jurisprudence,' in which I have mentioned that seven-eighths of all the deranged patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital, in the year 1811, had frequent pulses; and that a pardon was granted to a criminal by the