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Title: A Mind That Found Itself
An Autobiography

Author: Clifford Whittingham Beers

Release Date: April 8, 2004 [EBook #11962]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A MIND THAT FOUND ITSELF

_An Autobiography_

By
CLIFFORD WHITTINGHAM BEERS

_First edition, March, 1908
Second edition, with additions, June, 1910
Reprinted, November, 1912
Third edition revised, March, 1913
Reprinted, September, 1913
Reprinted, July, 1914
Fourth edition revised, March, 1917
Reprinted, February, 1920
Fifth edition revised, October, 1921_

Dedicated
TO THE MEMORY OF MY UNCLE
SAMUEL EDWIN MERWIN
WHOSE TIMELY GENEROSITY I BELIEVE SAVED MY LIFE
AND WHOSE DEATH HAS FOREVER ROBBED
ME OF A SATISFYING OPPORTUNITY
TO PROVE MY GRATITUDE

A Mind That Found Itself

I

This story is derived from as human a document as ever existed; and,
because of its uncommon nature, perhaps no one thing contributes so
much to its value as its authenticity. It is an autobiography, and
more: in part it is a biography; for, in telling the story of my life,
I must relate the history of another self--a self which was dominant
from my twenty-fourth to my twenty-sixth year. During that period I was
unlike what I had been, or what I have been since. The biographical
part of my autobiography might be called the history of a mental civil
war, which I fought single-handed on a battlefield that lay within the
compass of my skull. An Army of Unreason, composed of the cunning and
treacherous thoughts of an unfair foe, attacked my bewildered
consciousness with cruel persistency, and would have destroyed me, had
not a triumphant Reason finally interposed a superior strategy that
saved me from my unnatural self.

I am not telling the story of my life just to write a book. I tell it
because it seems my plain duty to do so. A narrow escape from death and
a seemingly miraculous return to health after an apparently fatal
illnes