From this results a disturbed condition of the brain; it is irritated, not excited, by its healthy or proper stimulus; and it follows that such derangement of the manifestations of mind ensues as we term a dream. Waking, however, soon takes place, and the blood is more scarlet, and the faculties themselves gradually awake. As this is more perfect, we remember the dream, and are enabled to explain it, and know that it was a dream. The mind is now restored, so that scarlet blood indicates healthy thought, and black blood its reverse. Your pardon for this prolixity and dulness. The healthy or unhealthy crisis of the blood is a most important subject in our argument, and too constantly slighted in the question of illusion.
Monsieur Denis records the story of a young man of Paris, in the 17th century, who was cured of a stubborn and protracted lethargy, by the transfusion of the arterial blood of a lamb; and another of a recovery from madness, by that of the arterial blood of a calf, and these in presence of men both of science and high quality.
I do not affirm my implicit faith in this statement, of the effect of gentle blood, but I am certain of the poisonous influence of that of another quality; and I will cite a passage from Hoffman, the German poet, whom Monsieur Poupon, in his “Illustrations of Phrenology,” adduces as a specimen of marvellousness, ere I offer my cases.
“Why do my thoughts, whether I am awake or asleep, always tend, in spite of all my efforts, to the gloomy subject of insanity? It seems to me as if I felt my disordered ideas escaping from my mind, like hot blood from a wounded vein.”
This was figurative, but it was true; for of itself this black blood may be suddenly the cause of furious and fatal mania. When Dionis, in his “Cours d’Opérations de Chirurgie,” is referring to that operation that has lately, by its revival, occupied so much of the attention of the medical world (the process of transfusion) he says: “La fin funeste de ces malheureuses victimes de la nouveauté, detruisit, en un jour, les hautes idées qu’ils avoient conçues; ils devinrent foux, furieux, et moururent ensuite.”
The relief of the brain, by the escape of this blood, is of deeper interest to science than the mere romancer may imagine.
Sir Samuel Romilly was for a moment, I believe, in a state of sanity, when blood had flowed from the divided vessels of his throat; for he attempted, it appeared, to stop its flow by thrusting the towel with some force into the wound.
So diseases of the heart, by keeping the black blood in the brain, predispose to dreaming. During the age of terror in France, organic diseases of the heart and cases of mania were most prevalent.
I may for a moment indulge in analogies regarding this arrest of the blood. Cases of inflammation of the ear are often seen in confirmed maniacs (the helix being usually the part most inflamed), and black blood often oozes from the part.
M. Calmeil considers chronic phlegmasia of the brain as the cause of insanity, the derangement itself being, as it were, the moral result or disease, and the organic changes or proximate cause the physical disease; both being but the sequelæ, or consequence of inflammation.