[310 Mothers’ remedies]

Causes of Insanity.—­There are many and various causes.  One author states:  “Mental abnormality is always due to either imperfect or eccentric physical development, or to the effects of inborn or acquired physical disease, or to injurious impressions, either ante-natal or post natal, upon the delicate and intricate physical structure known as the human brain.”  Some physical imperfections, more than others, give rise to mental derangements, and some persons, more than others, when affected by any bodily ailment, tend to aberrated conditions of the mind.  Some impressions more than others, are peculiarly unfortunate by reason of their crowding effects upon the brain tablets of a sensitive mind.  To these natural defects and unnatural tendencies, we apply, in the general way, the term “Insane Diathesis.”  This diathesis may be inherited or acquired.  Those who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents or from an ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in the blood.  But they do receive from their progenitors oftentimes certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as upon their physical being, which impressions, like iron molds, fix and shape their subsequent destinies.”

The insane diathesis in the child may come from hysteria in the mother.  A drunken father may impel epilepsy, madness or idiocy in the child.  Ungoverned passions, from love to hate, from hope to fear, when indulged in overmuch by the parents, may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of the children.  “The insane may often trace their sad humiliation and utter unfitness for life’s duties back through a tedious line of unrestrained passion, of prejudice, bigotry, and superstition unbridled, of lust unchecked, of intemperance uncontrolled, of avarice unmastered, and of nerve resources wasted, exhausted, and made bankrupt before its time.  Timely warnings by the physician and appeals to his clients of today, may save them for his own treatment, instead of consigning them to an asylum where his fees cease from doubling, and the crazed ones are at rest.”  The causes of the insane diathesis (constitution) are frequently traceable to the methods of life of those who produce children under such circumstances and conditions that the offspring bear the indelible birthmark of mental weakness.  Early dissipations of the father produce an exhausted and enfeebled body; and a demoralized mind and an unholy and unhealthy existence in the mother, are causes.  Fast living of parents in society is a fruitful cause of mental imperfections in their children.  “The sons of royalty and the sons of the rich, are often weak in brain force because of the high living of their ancestry.”

The fast high livers of today are developing rapidly and surely, strong tendencies to both mental and physical disorders.  Elbert Hubbard says of those who live at a certain hotel and waste their substance there, that they are apt “to have gout at one end, general paresis at the other, and Bright’s disease in the middle.”