| Description Of Item | Illustration from the collection of Alexander Morison. Plate 45 of Morison’s 'The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases' (1840). Unsigned [François Rochard].
'Portrait of S. C. aged 48, a publican's wife, without children.
The assigned cause of her disorder is, having been frightened by a thief— she herself says, that she often took the sacrament unworthily. Her disorder commenced about a year ago by melancholy. This poor woman is in the deepest distress of mind, she conceives that she is delivered up to the devil, that the devil is within her, in the form of a serpent; that she herself is the serpent, and the cause of all the misery in the world — no arguments can undeceive her.
She never enters into conversation, screams at short intervals, day and night, and wrings her hands as if suffering great anguish; she continually rubs the side of her head, and picks the hairs out of it.
She replies rationally on all other subjects, is quiet, and easily managed.' |