Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu/133

Rh than five hundred clocks chimed the hour with their flute-like voices. Goatsuckers, storks, striped geese, unicorns, griffins, nightmares, all the menagerie of monstrous dreams, trotted, jumped, flew, or glided through the room. According to his calculation this state, of which the above quotations give but a feeble representation, must have lasted three hundred years; for the sensations succeeded each other so numerously and powerfully that the relative appreciation of time was impossible. When the attack was over, he found that it had occupied about a quarter of an hour. These drugs operate only upon the circulation, the nervous system, and the brain. They are physical agents, operating upon a physical basis, and yet they produce phenomena resembling those of dreams, with the exception that they do not in every case divorce the motor and sensory nerves from the sensorium as perfectly as in ordinary dreaming sleep.

Delirium is analogous in most respects to the conditions produced by these drugs. Its stages are often very similar to those of intoxication; so that it requires a skilled physician to determine whether the patient is under the influence of delirium, insanity, or intoxication. Delirium results from change in the circulation, or a defective condition of the blood; and in most instances there is no difficulty, when the disease is understood, in assigning the approximate cause of the delirium. The partial recollection or forgetfulness of what was thought, felt, said, or done in the delirium, and similar recollection or forgetfulness of dream-images, is well known by all who have experienced both, or closely observed them. The analogy between delirium and intoxication loses nothing in value from the fact that the drug is administered. Disease in the human system can engender intoxicating poisons as well as others.