Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/588

570 discipline, not correction of the mind through the soul's portals, for she was a truly good and high-minded woman, but a remedying of the bodily condition on which the mental state causally depended. As a matter of fact, well-directed treatment produced a restoration of the normal feelings and emotions which all the spiritual exercises had signally failed to achieve.

Another peculiar and fairly-pronounced mental attitude is that furnished by the victim of cancer. The form assumed here is that of sullen and defiant submission to the inevitable. There is rarely any active and positive attempt made by the sufferers themselves to avert their doom. There is, as it were, a volitional control exercised over the impulses, which is marked, and the sufferer submits to a grip he sees no chance of eluding. But it must not be supposed that there is an abolition of the instinct of self-preservation; it is merely subordinated. That this is the actual attitude is shown by the fact that when the mind is wandering at the last, especially in gastric cancer, which interferes so much with nutrition, the patients in their delirium commonly ask for a knife in order to excise the hostile malignant growth which is involving their existence.

The mental attitude of pyæmia (alteration of the blood by pus) is, again, quite distinct from any of the foregoing. It is that of absolute indifference. From the first long shivering fit which marks the initiation of the fateful disease, the mental attitude is usually that of imperturbable indifference. Marked by utter unconcern as to the course of the disease, it contrasts very strikingly with the ill-founded hopefulness of hectic, and especially of pulmonary phthisis. Of course it is not asserted that the mental attitudes described are invariable and ever present in the different diseases; only that they are so common that they cannot be regarded as mere coincidences.

In diabetes mellitus, too, there is a condition of mental languor and depression, which is as marked as the muscular lethargy and lassitude manifested by sufferers from that affection, and which often precedes those physical symptoms which we are too much inclined to regard as the chief indications of that disease.

The condition of the mind in the delirium of fever is a subject of much interest, albeit it is surrounded by many difficulties. The great one is that people at large are too much accustomed and inclined to regard delirium as aimless, objectless mental action—a chaos of broken ideas and unconnected thoughts, or an uncovering of the sewers of the mind, the revealing of secrets not always innocent. The first is the way in which they regard it in others, the latter, the form in which they apprehend it in themselves, so that there is not given to it that intelligent attention the subject deserves; nor are those immediately and constantly around the delirious patient likely to possess a calm, dispassionate, and competent capacity to attend to what is going on in his mind, so far as it finds expression in words. The anxious