ho will give thought and diligence to the task,
will effect a cure.
You know my tract on "The Cardinal Functions of the Brain." I there, by
the evidence of innumerable facts, prove, as I think, the high
probability of a circulation arterial and venous in its mechanism,
through the nerves. Of this system, thus considered, the brain is the
heart. The fluid, which is propagated hence through one class of nerves,
returns in an altered state through another, and the nature of that
fluid is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than, as I before
remarked, light or electricity are so.
By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green
tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more
frequently disturbed as to equilibrium. This fluid being that which we
have in common with spirits, a congestion found upon the masses of brain
or nerve, connected with the interior sense, forms a surface unduly
exposed, on which disembodied spirits may operate: communication is thus
more or less effectually established. Between this brain circulation and
the heart circulation there is an intimate sympathy. The seat, or rather
the instrument of exterior vision, is the eye. The seat of interior
vision is the nervous tissue and brain, immediately about and above the
eyebrow. You remember how effectually I dissipated your pictures by the
simple application of iced eau-de-cologne. Few cases, however, can be
treated exactly alike with anything like rapid success. Cold acts
powerfully as a repellant of the nervous fluid. Long enough continued it
will even produce that permanent insensibility which we call numbness,
and a little longer, muscular as well as sensational paralysis.
I have not, I repeat, the slightest doubt that I should have first
dimmed and ultimately sealed that inner eye which Mr. Jennings had
inadvertently opened. The same senses are opened in delirium tremens,
and entirely shut up again when the overaction of the cerebral heart,
and the prodigious nervous congestions that attend it, are terminated by
a decided change in the state of the body. It is by acting steadily upon
the body, by a simple process, that this result is produced--and
inevitably produced--I have never yet failed.
Poor Mr. Jennings made away with himself. But that catastrophe was the
result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected
itself upon the disease which was established. His case was in th
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