Case CLIII

A lodging-house keeper, of a powerful constitution, a sanguine temperament, who, from time to time, indulged in excesses, was taken twenty-four years ago to the private mad-house of Madame Marcel de Saint Colombo, where I was visiting physician. He was much flushed, his eye was wild and brilliant. He explained, under great agitation, that his aunt had let a part of his house to the keepers of a menagerie (an error), which had exceedingly annoyed him. "One of them," he added, "has, at three different times, insulted my wife; this conduct incensed me; I rushed on the villain; but although he changed himself into a horse, and diminished in size, it did not prevent me from killing him."

This patient had, besides, hallucinations of sight; he misnamed us all, and saw monsters and strange shapes in the air. Perhaps he metamorphosed the clouds into his conceptions.

His excitement was so great that we were obliged to put on him the strait waistcoat. I had his head shaved, put thirty leeches on the sagittal suture, and on the following day he was placed in the bath. In two days his symptoms were much ameliorated. To these means were added purgatives, alternately with baths. In eight days from his admission to the house, he had entirely recovered the use of his intellectual faculties.

In the article Hypochondria, we have stated the case of a German professor, who imagined himself to be under magnetic influence, and believed that a magnetizer was lodged within him. To divert his ideas, and at the same time to relieve the pains of which he complained in the abdomen and stomach, I placed two large blisters on his legs. His countenance, which had been very sad, soon assumed a more cheerful expression; he ceased to speak of his false sensations; and the distraction caused by intellectual employment completed his cure.

One of our patients was persuaded that several men had entered his room with evil intentions towards him. Full of rage at this idea, he endeavored to provoke them, and applied to them the most disgraceful epithets; as they continued to jeer at him, he called loudly for a knife to kill his persecutors. The treatment consisted in purgatives and baths; and in one month from his entrance he was restored in health to his family.

Mademoiselle C lost her senses owing to a disappointment in love; she fancied her lover was constantly by her side; perceived him in heaven, in the clouds, called him by the tenderest names; she addressed him and he replied to her. This young lady was taken daily to the bath, where she remained four, five, and six hours, receiving the water on her head by means of continued irrigation; on the fourth day the hallucinations ceased, and in one week she was perfectly cured.

Sanguine emissions are at times useful, but must not be used too prodigally; without referring to the serious results mentioned by Pinel, and the truth of which can be attested by all physicians of the insane, experience proves that a patient may be bled even to syncope, without any change being effected in the ideas.