Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/69

Rh of new forms of disease, which hardly existed before. For example, general progressive paralysis was formerly so rare that no special name was given to it till our time, while now it forms the larger quota of the maladies of the wealthy, of thinkers, and of military men. Epilepsy has greatly increased in its psychical form, so that what are called psychical and obscure epilepsy are a revelation of our times, and that its close association with crime (which I believe to be one of the sure facts of modern psychiatry) is still accepted by only a very few alienists, not to say that it is rejected with indignation, and, I will remark, with profound ignorance, by most modern jurists.

Alcoholism, too, has taken on enormous proportions. Not that the ancients did not drink, but rather that pure alcohol had not yet been introduced; while in the middle ages it passed for one of the most efficacious remedies—aqua vita, living water. Dr. Beard has made a most judicious observation in America which I have been able to verify in Sicily—that there must be a very advanced degree of civilization, or rather of degeneracy produced by civilization, for inebriety to be transformed into that aggregation of disasters, especially of the nervous system, which is called alcoholism. Now we have not alcoholism only, but morphinism, cocainism, all stimuli of the nervous system, which are used by barbarians as potent excitants, but not to the point of producing stable alterations except in rare cases, like the amuck of the Malays.

And now, we all of us, at least in the capitals and the great centers, find ourselves consumed by a feverish activity which makes the mind labor much more than Nature intended it should, under which is produced all this mass of neurasthenics, hystericals, besides the multitudes of moral insane, profoundly egotistical persons, without affection and wholly directed by a powerful passion for gold, for which they sacrifice everything, even salvation!

And, finally, we have that group of semi-insane, which I call mattoidi, and who are known as détraqués in France and cranks in North America—that is, those who have the livery of genius with a substratum of weakness and the practical cunning of the average man, who betray their errors only when they write, who hardly exist save among males (with a few exceptions, like Michel) and in the great centers. I have never seen them in the country. Civilization is now depopulating the country and building up the cities, as it is also augmenting physical excitants with alcoholism, morphinism, etc. Civilization emblazons the baton of the marshal, and not only of the marshal but of the president of the republic, in the eyes of everybody who can read and write. Why, then, should we not suppose that civilization can further derange the equilibrium of mental labor and, indirectly, therefore cause an increase of insanity?