The results of a long and diligently pursued investigation of the disorder termed mental derangement ... / by George Henry Cullis.

  • Cullis, George Henry.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The results of a long and diligently pursued investigation of the disorder termed mental derangement ... / by George Henry Cullis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    attorney. The sedentariness of an office life soon nurtured both the consequences of his abnormal condition and the inherited morbid state, which were exhibited in cerebral irritability, and enforced rest- lesness; remaining away from the office without leave, becoming insolent, and pursuing such abandoned habits, that obliged the attorney to cancel the indentures. Strong efforts were afterwards made to reclaim the young man, but, as asserted, in vain, and the epileptic disposition being so considerably augmented by frequent inebriation, the fits occurred with such frequency and intensity that rendered him incapable of following any remunerative employment, and his relatives were most reluctantly compelled to send him into the Cheltenham Union;’ where every care consistent with the rules of the ‘house’ was bestowed upon him. Shortly after that occurrence, a young man named Green, visited Cheltenham ; and inquiring for his former acquaintance, heard with dismay that ‘he was then a pauper in the Union!’ Still, Green determined upon seeing him : and their meeting was a most painful one, to young Green in particular, and who very probably holding a similar cause of cerebral irritability, rushed back into the town, purchased a pistol, loaded it, and returned to the Union, where he insanely perpetrated that horrid crime, self-destruction. An inquest was held upon him there, 30th July, 1868, before Mr. Lovegrove, the coroner, at which inquest an elder brother, and a sister attended from a distant part of the country, and identified the body as that of Frederick Green, who they both well knew. The Lady stated further that “the deceased was an intimate friend of the family, and dearly loved her brother—indeed that brother was generally beloved until he unfortunately became so abandoned—and the shock to Frederick Green, at seeing a friend he had loved, an inmate of a Union, clothed in a pauper’s garb, must have overpowered his reason, impelling him to the commission of the wicked act.” The coroner highly commended the young lady for ‘ the feeling and explicit nature of her evidence, as it cleared the case for the jury ; who after a brief address to them, returned a verdict of suicide, while in a state of ‘temporary derangement.” A full report of this ‘extraordinary suicide ’ was published on the following Wednesday, in the ‘ Chel- tenham Examiner.’ The • young man was soon after that dire event, taken from the ‘ Unionand wherever he may be, he still holds in