The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology (Volume 3)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1801. Excerpt: ... are important questions to solve, inasmuch as the solution involves, not only the discrimination of what is religious truth, but also the determination of the etiology and treatment of insanity in matters of religious belief and conduct.' We readily admit the absurdity and sin of attempting to ' remedy heterodoxy' by fire; and we do not doubt that the vagaries of many religious errorists have originated in some disorder of the physical system, which medical skill might have controlled.--p. 5. Our critic then goes on, through several weary pages, to disprove what needed no argument against it--that the heretic is not always a madman, as if, in the above sentence, we had asserted and maintained so absurd a proposition. Inter alia, he remarks: -- If, for example, the denial of the divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must be regarded as a heresy, we can scarcely suppose our author to mean that it could be cured by ' a dose of hellebore.' The great Apostle to the Gentiles was not a ' religious madman' when he sought authority from the high priest, and set out on his bloody mission to seize, bind, and persecute to death any disciples of the Lord whom he could find out at Damascus. The wonderful scene which occurred upon the journey was not fitted to restore a maniac to reason, though it was marvellously efficacious in transforming a blasphemer into a believer, and a persecutor into an apostle. The madness was in his heart. The disease was in his moral nature, and not in the structure or functions of his cerebrum.-p. 6. Who ever has said or argued to the contrary? Not we, assuredly. All we have asserted is this, that a perusal of the histories of religious wars and persecutions leads us to the conviction, that the insane on religious ideas and doctri...