ost passionate man alive? A moral patient, who allows
his brain to be disordered by the fumes of liquor, instead of being
suffered to be a ridiculous being, might have opiates prescribed; for in
laying him asleep as soon as possible, you remove the cause of his
sudden madness. There are crimes for which men are hanged, but of which
they might easily have been cured by physical means. Persons out of
their senses with love, by throwing themselves into a river, and being
dragged out nearly lifeless, have recovered their senses, and lost their
bewildering passion. Submersion is discovered to be a cure for some
mental disorders, by altering the state of the body, as Van Helmont
notices, "was happily practised in England." With the circumstance to
which this sage of chemistry alludes, I am unacquainted; but this
extraordinary practice was certainly known to the Italians; for in one
of the tales of the Poggio we find a mad doctor of Milan, who was
celebrated for curing lunatics and demoniacs in a certain time. His
practice consisted in placing them in a great high-walled court-yard, in
the midst of which there was a deep well full of water, cold as ice.
When a demoniac was brought to this physician, he had the patient bound
to a pillar in the well, till the water ascended to the knees, or
higher, and even to the neck, as he deemed their malady required. In
their bodily pain they appear to have forgot their melancholy; thus by
the terrors of the repetition of cold water, a man appears to have been
frightened into his senses! A physician has informed me of a remarkable
case; a lady with a disordered mind, resolved on death, and swallowed
much more than half a pint of laudanum; she closed her curtains in the
evening, took a farewell of her attendants, and flattered herself she
should never awaken from her sleep. In the morning, however,
notwithstanding this incredible dose, she awoke in the agonies of death.
By the usual means she was enabled to get rid of the poison she had so
largely taken, and not only recovered her life, but, what is more
extraordinary, her perfect senses! The physician conjectures that it was
the influence of her disordered mind over her body which prevented this
vast quantity of laudanum from its usual action by terminating in
death.[299]

Moral vices or infirmities, which originate in the state of the body,
may be cured by topical applications. Precepts and ethics in such cases,
if they seem to produce a m