Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Connected as this Asylum is with a city almost purely commercial -- a city the majority of whose active adults are subject to the cares, the perplexities, and the fluctua-tions of trade, it is not remarkable that among moral causes, pecuniary difficulties should occupy the most prominent position. Under this head there are one hun-dred and eighteen men, and fifteen women, a total of one hundred and thirty-three; and if, as may be most proper, the eleven cases assigned to "the want of employment" be included, the total will be one hundred and forty-four. There, is perhaps, no mental influence which, if examined in all its bearings and relations, exercises so ex-tensive and controling a power upon man in civilized coun-tries, and more particularly in the U. States, as that arising from his pecuniary condition. Connected with this are many if not all his hopes, and schemes of ambi-tion, preferment and agrandisement -- all his prospects of present and future temporal comfort, and all his affections that are enlisted in the welfare of the persons constituting his domestic circle.

A constant business, moderate in extent and sufficient-ly lucrative to afford a liberal subsistance, can never, in a mind well regulated, operate as an exciting cause of mental disorder. The sources of the evil are, on the one hand, the ambitious views and the endeavours rapidly to accumulate wealth, and, on the other, the extremes of excessive business, of bankruptcy and of poverty, the fluctuations and the unwholesome disposition to speculation. Of the one hundred and eighteen cases of men arranged under the head of pecuniary difficulties, the disease in three was attributed to excess of business; in two, to retiring from business; in four, to a sudden access of fortune; in one, to speculation in stocks, and in two, to speculation in the morus multicaulus.

Moral philosophy requires not, for its illustration, the assistance of the fable of the lion and the gad-fly, when so harmless and apparently impotent a vegetable as the mulberry can overturn the faculties of the human mind.

The moral cause which ranks next in point of numbers among both the men, and women, is the anxiety and other mental influences in reference to religion. The whole number attributed to these is ninety-three; of whom, fifty-one were males, and forty-two females. Although there were more men than women, yet the proportionate num-ber, when compared with the whole number of admissions, is greatest in the latter.

In a country of universal toleration upon religious subjects, and sheltering under this broad banner congregations of almost every sect that has ever appeared in Christendom, it is to be supposed that the religious sentiment would act under its greatest possible variety of phases, and in every diversity of gradation between the extremes of apathy and fanaticism. The accurate observer of the events of the last twenty years, to say nothing of a period more remote, cannot fail to have per-ceived that this is actually the fact. Under these circumstances, and when we consider the whole scope and bearing of this sentiment, and the eternal interests which are its subject, we can not but perceive how important an influence it may exert. It is difficult to believe that "pure religion and undefiled" should overthrow the powers of the mind to which it was intended to yield the composure of a humble hope and the stability of a confiding faith. Nor do facts authorise any conclusion thus hostile to Christianity, for a great majority of the cases of insanity attributed to religious influence, can be traced to the ardor of a zeal untempered with prudence, or a fanaticism as unlike the true religion which it professes, as a grotesque mask is to the face which it conceals. The exciting doctrines of Miller, the self-styled prophet of the immediate destruction of the world, gained but little hold of the public mind in this vicinity, but in those sections of the country where they obtained the most extensive credence, the institutions for the insane became peopled with large numbers, the faculties of whose minds had been overthrown thereby.

The passions or emotions whose activity tends to depress the energies of both body and mind, may he considered, on strictly physiological principles, as powerful agents in the production of mental disease.

Remorse is the first of these mentioned in the table, and eleven cases, of which five weremales -sic- and six females, are attributed to it.

Grief caused by the death of relatives, stands next in position, but first in point of numbers, including as it does forty-three cases, of which sixteen were males, and twenty-seven females. Of the men, the particular rela-tives whose death was followed by so unfortunate an occurrence, is stated to have been the wife in six cases; the wife and child in one; the wife and five children in one; the child in three; the mother in two; the sister in one, and the brother in two.

Of the women, it was the husband in five cases; the child in eight; the father in one; the mother in one; the mother and child in one; the mother and sister in one; the sister in one; the brother in two, and the brother and sister in one.