“How few beneath auspicious planets born With swelling sails make good the promis’d port, With all their wishes freighted.”
“In this country,” Dr. J. Johnson justly observes, “where man’s relations with the world around him are multiplied beyond all example in any other country, in consequence of the intensity of interest attached to politics, religion, amusement, literature, and the arts; where the temporal concerns of an immense proportion of the population are in a perpetual state of vacillation; where spiritual affairs excite in the minds of many great anxiety; and where speculative risks are daily involving in difficulties all classes of society,—the operation of physical causes in the production of disease dwindles into complete insignificance when compared with that of anxiety and perturbation of mind.”
“Mens conscia recti in corpore sano,” is Horace’s well-known description of the happy man. Lucretius appears to have formed a correct estimate of the most important bodily and mental conditions on which our happiness depends:—
“O wretched mortals! race perverse and blind! Through what dread, dark, what perilous pursuits Pass ye this round of being! Know ye not, Of all ye toil for, Nature nothing asks, But for the _body_ freedom from disease, And sweet unanxious quiet for the mind?”
Like human beings, the sciences are closely connected with, and are mutually dependent upon, one another. The link in the chain may not be apparent, but it has a real and palpable existence. Medical and moral science are more nearly allied than we should, _à priori_, conclude. We speak of the science of medicine, not the practice of it; for, like judgment and wit, or, as the author of the School for Scandal ironically observes, like _man and wife_, how seldom are they seen in happy union. Garth feelingly alludes to this unnatural divorce:—
“The healing art now, sick’ning, hangs its head, And, once a _science_, has become a _trade_.”
Psychological medicine has been sadly neglected. We recoil from the study of mental philosophy as if we were encroaching on holy ground. So great is the prejudice against this branch of science, that it has been observed, that to recommend a man to study metaphysics was a delicate mode of suggesting the propriety of confining him in a lunatic asylum!