The blood was found to be but a partial test of disease, for there is much in the body which does not mingle with the blood, whilst the perspiration contains impurities thrown off by every part of the organization, and, when examined through our microscopes, never fails to give warning.
At the same time the blood is the subject of deep study in Montalluyah; and every point connected with its component parts, colour, circulation, heat, quality, purification, is thoroughly understood.
The physicians sometimes examine the breath. With this view, the patient breathes on a little instrument saturated with a preparation which condenses and retains the breath. Ample opportunity is thus afforded for its microscopic examination, and for the discovery of the unhealthy particles with which the breath may be impregnated.
XV.
MADNESS.
"Think not others blind because ye will not see….The concentrated light of the soul is not visible to the naked eye."
The microscope also led to the discovery of the incipient causes of madness, by the facility it afforded us for the dissection and examination of the minutest portions of the numerous divisions of the brain.
Before my laws came into operation the incipient symptoms of monomania were rarely noticed, and many were driven into confirmed madness and crime by neglect or improper treatment, whilst some of the supposed lunatics were really wiser than their keepers or the doctors who attended them. It often happened that the aspirations of a superior mind were mistaken for indications of the malady, and led to the incarceration of the supposed lunatic. For instance, a poor man, who lived in the reign of my predecessor, thought, and truly thought, that electricity might be used as a motive power for the heaviest bodies, and supply the place of wood used as fuel in manufactures. He also thought that electricity, then impalpable to the senses, was the material ingredient affecting the weight and coherence of bodies. People laughed at what they supposed to be illusions, and there the matter might have stopped; but the poor man persisted in his assertions that the sun contained electricity, which could be attracted, concentrated, and applied to various purposes. He appealed to the well-known fact, that the sun ripens the fruits of the earth, changes the colours of substances, affects the brain, and produces many wondrous phenomena without visible contact. His lucubrations, instead of suggesting experiment, were received with derision, and the man himself was cruelly treated, his very persistency in the truth convincing the world that he was a confirmed madman. In vain he appealed to the officers charged to visit the monomaniacs, and, in spite of all his efforts, he died in a lunatic asylum.
So dangerous, indeed, was it formerly to announce new ideas opposed to those already received, that we had a proverb to the effect, that he was not mad who had "droll" thoughts, but he was so who told them to the world. The proverb is now somewhat reversed, and he is thought wicked who, being favoured with gleams of light, allows them to perish with him.
Accompanying all laws, I gave to the people my reasons at length for their promulgation, together with answers to anticipated objections; and in the exposition of the laws relating to madness I bid them recollect that had I endeavoured to put my thoughts into action some years earlier, I should undoubtedly have suffered similar persecution to those under which many others had succumbed.