Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/259

 preys upon the mind, and health, like a shuttle-cock, is bandied from the one to the other, finding a resting place in neither; when the whole system, physical and metaphysical, becomes irritable and disturbed,and the physician is perplexed to determine which is the seat of the disease;it often happens that no active remedy is thought of, and the morbid diathesis is entrusted to time alone to effect a cure. Nor are any further steps taken till the patient sinks into hypochondriasis; till the overstretched mind threatens imbecility; or till the moral shock recoiling upon the corporeal frame, gives rise to symptoms of acute disease, that bring the unfortunate man to the margin of the grave, from which nothing but a long residence in his native country can rescue him. I fear many medical officers would scruple to give a sick certificate for such mental affliction, and that Government would look gravely before they sanctioned leave of absence in such cases; yet such seem to me as much entitled to indulgence as the more palpable distempers of the body.

I am not prepared to prove the frequency of insanity in India compared with that of Britain, but I am convinced that the climate and mode of life strongly predispose to that most dreadful of all disorders, and I would dissuade every one with any strong hereditary tendency, from settling in