On obscure diseases of the brain, and disorders of the mind

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Page 215 - The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on ; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.
Page 354 - A case of this kind occurred in a Catholic town in Germany, a year or two before my arrival at Gottingen, and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read nor write, was seized •with a nervous fever ; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighborhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil.
Page 355 - ... death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the pastor's habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared that it had been the old man's custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favourite books.
Page 39 - The great deliverer he, who from the gloom Of cloistered monks and jargon-teaching schools, Led forth the true philosophy, there long Held in the magic chain of words and forms And definitions void: he led her forth, Daughter of Heaven! that, slow-ascending still, Investigating sure the chain of things, With radiant finger points to Heaven again.
Page 329 - Her memory was capacious, and stored with a copious stock of ideas. Unexpectedly, and without any forewarning, she fell into a profound sleep, which continued several hours beyond the ordinary term. On waking, she was discovered to have lost every trait of acquired knowledge. Her memory was tabula rasa ; all vestiges, both of words and things, were obliterated and gone. It was found necessary for her to learn everything again.
Page 186 - ... by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command ; I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervours of the crab.
Page 29 - The labyrinth may be too intricate, and the thread too fine, to be traced through all its windings; but if we stop where we can trace it no farther, and secure the ground we have gained, there is no harm done; a quicker eye may in time trace it farther.
Page 355 - ... that the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even till the old man's death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man. With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's who had lived with him as a housekeeper and had inherited his effects.
Page 216 - ... no living witness of his earthly agony. When man and all his race shall have disappeared from the face of our planet, ask every particle of air still floating over the unpeopled earth, and it will record the cruel mandate of the tyrant. Interrogate every wave which breaks unimpeded on ten thousand desolate shores, and it will give evidence of the last gurgle of the waters which closed over the head of his dying victim, confront the murderer with every corporeal atom of his immolated slave, and...
Page 281 - ... nurse and mamma the child uses, determine themselves to those persons. Afterwards, when time and a larger acquaintance have made them observe, that there are a great many other things in the world that in some common agreements of shape, and several other qualities, resemble their father and mother, and those persons they have been used to, they frame an idea, which they find those many particulars do partake in ; and to that they give, with others, the name man for example.

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