case of chronic meningitis. The work of German men of science in this field is noble indeed. A great succession, from Wier to Virchow, have erected a barrier against which all the efforts of reactionists beat in vain.[1]
In America, the belief in diabolic influence had, in the early colonial period, full control. The Mathers supported it fully, and the Salem witchcraft horrors were among its results; but the discussion of that folly by Calef struck it a severe blow, and a better influence spread rapidly throughout the colonies.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the old belief in diabolic possession had practically disappeared from all enlightened countries. In Protestant Germany, where it had raged most severely, it was, as a rule, cast out of the church formulas, catechisms, and hymns, and became more and more a subject for jocose allusion.[2] From force of habit, and for the sake of consistency, some of the more conservative theological authorities continued to repeat the old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of the insane.
But, although the old superstition had been discarded, the inevitable conservatism in theology and medicine caused many old abuses to be continued for years after the theological basis for them had really disappeared. There still lingered also a feeling of indifference toward madmen, engendered by the early feeling of hostility toward them, which sufficed to prevent for many years any practical reforms.
What that old feeling had been, even under the most favorable circumstances, and among the best of men, we have seen in the fact that Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to be publicly flogged; and it will be remembered that Shakespeare makes one of his characters refer to madmen as deserving "a dark house and a whip." And what the old treatment was and continued to be we know but too well. Taking Protestant England as an example—and it was probably the most humane—we have a chain of testimony. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital was reported too loathsome for any man to enter; in the seventeenth century, John Evelyn found it no better; in the eighteenth, Hogarth's pictures and contemporary
- ↑ See Kirchhoff, pp. 181-187; also Längin, "Religion und Hexenprozess," as above cited.
- ↑ Luther's great hymn, "Ein' feste Burg," remained, of course, a prominent exception to the rule; but a popular proverb came to express the general feeling: "Auf Teufel reimt sich Zweifel." See Längin, as above, pp. 545, 546.
