Page:Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind - Benjamin Rush.djvu/18

 intellectual madness, but it rarely continues to affect the other faculties of the mind after two or three weeks, or after the liberal use of depleting remedies. Thus fever, in its first attack, affects the bowels and nervous system, and in a few days settles down into a disease chiefly of the blood-vessels.

Derangement in the understanding, has been divided into partial and general. The causes of both are the same. I should proceed immediately to enumerate them, but as the seat or proximate cause of a disease is generally the first object of a physician's inquiry on entering a sick room, it shall be the first subject of our consideration in the present inquiry.

1. The most ancient opinion, of the proximate cause of intellectual derangement, or what has been called madness, is, that it is derived from a morbid state of the liver, and that it discovers itself in a vitiated state of the bile. Hippocrates laid the foundation of this error by his encomium upon Democritus, whom he found employed in examining the liver of a dumb animal in order to discover the cause of madness.