Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/211

Rh of trickery. One other thing I had on my lips to say the other night, but I did not say it then, and I am not quite sure that I should do so now; therefore I can only indicate it very slightly. It is that this conclusion as to the diseased nature of these manifestations, so far as the mind of the recipient is concerned, was impressed upon me at a very early period during the epidemic of manifestations—of electro-biology as it was called then—in 1851 in Edinburgh. I had a dear friend, since dead, and dead under circumstances that no injury to him or any one else can be brought about by telling the story. He was of a bad constitution originally. He had entered on the study of medicine, and with such ardor had he taken up the branch of physiology that I regarded him as likely to be one of the greatest physiological inquirers of the day. I had not only respect for him as one of my pupils, but I had for him a feeling of regard and love. He was drawn into the vortex of Dr. Gregory's drawing-room exhibitions, and his case appears in Dr. Gregory's book; I knew it was disease; I felt it was disease. He was made to go out-of himself; he was made to wander here, there, and everywhere; he was made to converse with all the philosophers of ancient Greece—with Aristotle, with Socrates, and with Plato, and to tell what they said to him. He then took a somewhat serious illness, and I became his medical attendant, and for a time he was under my care alone. The persons who had obtained this strange influence over him still kept coming about him, but at last I had to forbid their presence. He got over his illness, and became so far better, and they then again attempted to catch him, but failed. Their power had gone, or almost gone, and only the poorer class of manifestations could be produced, and ultimately none of them could be produced, and for a considerable time after that he continued in better health. But the essentially diseased character of the whole thing was plain from this, that within a year or two he showed manifestations of actual insanity. The poor fellow excited my sympathy, and I made an effort to save him. I took him to London, got him to apply himself to histology, and tried to excite all his better and scientific predilections. But the morbid tendency was too strong, and ultimately he ended his days within the walls of an asylum. I do not mean to say that Dr. Gregory made him mad. That would be wrong. I do not think that was so, because he was better for a good while after that, but I mean to say that the tendency of these things in a constitution hereditarily predisposed to insanity is to insanity, or as Shakespeare has put it in the mouth of King Lear, when conscious that he is himself upon the giddy verge, "That way madness lies."