£*•

PASSIONAL DISEASES. 335
one passion, it must become morbid. This love ab
sorption is as sick as it is sickening. Enlarge the
spheres of both sexes, and we should have the soul
flowing out into other channels. Men of great minds,
great and varied pursuits and ambitions, never die of
jealousy. The cure, then, is as in the cases of the
others—
give rest and equilibrium, by bringing other
passions into play.
These examples of passional diseases will be suffi
cient, perhaps, to illustrate the subject, and to call the
attention of pathologists to a branch of medical science
which has been almost wholly neglected.
In passional diseases, we must adopt corresponding
modes of treatment. How many are cured by friend
ship, or ambition, or love ! How many
are benefited
by music, by books, by society. I have known a severe
and long-continued fit of mental depression to be cured
tune. I have known a world of new life
by a single
to come into the soul from a beautiful picture, or oftener
from a beautiful woman.
There are forms of morbid, mental, and moral phe
nomena, which may be merely glanced at. What is
called genius is often a disease. Stage-struckness is a
violent kind. So is the sublime longing that boys have
to go to sea. Romanticness is mostly diseased, and
commonly connected with excitement of amativeness.
Adventurousness, such as embarking in ill-planned and
ill-starred expeditions, is a contagious disease. Political
and other similar excitements, are not always free from
a morbid element. Intelligence, and the cultivation of
calm, deliberate powers of reasoning, will do much to
overcome these forms of disease. Like the diseases of