Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 March 1883 — Everybody Crazy. [ARTICLE]

Everybody Crazy.

Dr. Ball, in a lecture before the Paris Faculty of Medicine, argued that the number of persons perfectly reasonable on all points throughout the entire period of their existence form but a minority of mankind. The world abounds with people, he tells us, whom a strict scientific diagnosis would condemn as mad, or more or less “touched;” yet at no time of their life would it be permissible to put them under restraint. And the lecturer gave numerous instances of what he calls “the tyranny of a fixed idea” among persons ordinarily rational and supposed to have full control of their faculties. One sufferer, he says, feels an unctuous sensation all over his body, and takes it into his head that he has been dir ped in grease. Another, a studious, intelhgent young man, is obliged to give up reading altogether, because each time he turns over a page he imagines he has skipped a leaf. Back he is obliged to go again, again the fancy returns, and so he never makes progress. Dr. Cabade had once a patient whom he described as an excellent man of business, who nevertheless found himself free from the slightest physical weakness, to perform some Of the simplest acts of daily life. He could not cross the threshold of his door without being pushed from behind. He could not rise from his chair without calling for help. In the street his progress was liable to be stopped at any moment by some imaginary obstacle, wliich no effort of the will would enable him to cross. Every one numbers among his acquaintances some one who never tires of talking of the imaginary ailments from which he is suffering. Many a medical student has been driven half crazy from fancying that he had himself the symptoms of the different diseases which his books described. Perfectly sane people sufferffrom hallucinations of one sort or other. Lelorgnede Savigny was afflicted with visual hallucination, which was of so painful a character that he at last shut himself in a dark room and passed the remainder of his days there, having failed of obtaining relief in any othel way.