Page:Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind - Benjamin Rush.djvu/24

 mentions their sympathy with each other, by what he very happily calls "an intercommunion of sensation." It would seem as if a similar intercommunion took place between all the diseases of the brain. It is remarkable they all discover, in every part of the brain, marks of a morbid state of the blood-vessels.

II. From the ages and constitutions of persons who are most subject to madness. The former are in those years in which acute and inflammatory arterial diseases usually affect the body, and the latter, in persons who labour under the arterial predisposition.

III. I infer that madness is seated in the blood-vessels,

1. From its symptoms. These are a sense of fulness, and sometimes pain in the head; wakefulness, and a redness of the eyes, such as precede fever, a whitish tongue, a dry or moist skin, high coloured urine, a frequent, full or tense pulse, or a pulse morbidly slow or natural as to frequency. These states of the pulse occur uniformly in recent madness, and one of them, that is frequency, is seldom absent in its chronic state.