Part 17

This peculiar faculty was well known to the ancients. Hippocrates verily believed that there did exist individuals who could draw a voice from their belly. He speaks of the wife of Polimarchus, who, being affected with a quinsy, spoke in this manner; hence this power was called _Engastrimysm_. Plato gives the history of Euricles, who mentions three persons whom St. Chrysostom and Oecumenius considered to be endowed with a heavenly gift. Cælius Rhodiginus describes an old woman of Rovigo who used to deliver her oracles in the like manner, and who was never so eloquent as when stripped to the skin, when she would answer most accurately all the questions put to her by a familiar who attended upon her, and was called Cincinnatulus. Anthony Vandael, a physician of Harlem, considered ventriloquism as a supernatural power, enabling the voice to proceed "ex ventre inferiore et partibus genitalibus;" and he describes a woman of seventy-three years of age, called Barbara Jacobi, who used to ventriloquise with an imp of the name of Joachim, who would weep most piteously, or fall into roars of laughter, and sometimes danced and sung with remarkable grace and elegance, according to the depressing or the exhilarating nature of Mrs. Jacobi's communications. In the Septuagint the Hebrew word _Ob_ is rendered by _Engastrimythos_; and it was supposed that the Pythoness who evoked Samuel had recourse to this power. Oleaster, Grand Inquisitor of Portugal, in a work published at Lisbon in 1656, mentions a woman of the name of Cecilia who was brought before the court, and expressed herself in a ventriloquial voice, which she said was that of one Peter John, who had been dead for many years; but Peter John pleaded in vain for his hostess, for, despite his abdominal eloquence, she was sentenced to be transported. Whether Peter John accompanied her in exile is not stated. In 1643, Dickinson mentions a man at Oxford, who was called the King's Whisperer, and who expressed himself most clearly without opening the mouth or moving the lips. This faculty has frequently been employed in various speculations. In the sixteenth century, Borden relates the story of a valet of Francis I., named Brabant, who thus persuaded the mother of a young girl he courted to grant her consent to their marriage as speedily as possible, if she wished her husband's soul to get out of the torments of purgatory: after marriage, however, he was disappointed in his pecuniary expectations, and he applied his powers of ventriloquism to terrify a rich banker of Lyons, of the name of Corner, to bestow a fortune upon his wife; for which purpose he assumed the voice of Corner's father, who supplicated him to give the money as the only means of sending his poor consuming soul to paradise.

One of the most celebrated ventriloquists was a grocer of St. Germains, one St. Gilles; but he applied the faculty he possessed to benevolent purposes. Being called to reclaim a newly-married young man from a disgraceful connexion, which rendered his wife most unhappy, his supernatural voice, supposed to come from heaven, succeeded; and he was equally fortunate in bringing to a sense of propriety one of the most sordid misers of his time.

St. Gilles was not so felicitous in a trick he played to some monks, vainly attempting to prove the absurdity of their superstitious notions. One of the community had lately died, and, according to custom, the deceased was laid out in the church, and his brethren, grouped around him, were pouring forth prayers for the repose of his soul, when St. Gilles, throwing his voice into the coffin, returned them all the thanks of the departed friar for their supplications in his behalf. The astonished monks were most edified at this miraculous event; and their prior, who knew St. Gilles to be a freethinker, endeavoured to impress upon his mind the wonder that he himself had performed, and to inveigh most earnestly against the impiety and incredulity of modern philosophers, who entertained sceptic ideas concerning miracles. After a long exhortation, our ventriloquist burst into a fit of laughter, and avowed the deception he had practised: to convince the brotherhood of the veracity of his assertion, he gave them various specimens of his skill,--but to no purpose; he was called an infidel, a scoffer, an atheist, and, had it been in Spain, the stake would in all probability have rewarded his perilous frolic, or his stiff-necked impiety in refusing to believe in his own miracles.

It is now pretty generally admitted that ventriloquism simply consists in a slow and gradual expiration, preceded by a strong and deep inspiration, by which a considerable quantity of air is introduced into the lungs, which is afterwards acted upon by the flexible powers of the larynx and the trachea: any person therefore, by practice, can obtain more or less expertness in this exercise; in which, although not apparently, the voice is still modified by the mouth and the tongue. Mr. Lespagnol, in a very able dissertation on this subject, has demonstrated that ventriloquists have acquired by practice the power of exercising the veil of the palate in such a manner, that, by raising or depressing it, they dilate or contract the inner nostrils. If they are closely contracted, the sound produced is weak, dull, and seems to be more or less distant; if, on the contrary, these cavities are widely dilated, the sound is strengthened by these tortuous infractuosities, and the voice becomes loud, sonorous, and apparently close to us. Thus any able mimic who can with facility disguise his voice, with the aid of this power of modifying sounds, may in time become a ventriloquist.

CHAUCER'S DESCRIPTION OF A PHYSICIAN. THE DOCTOR OF PHYSIC.

With us there was a doctour of phisike; In all this world, ne was there none him like To speake of phisike and of surgerie, For he was grounded in astronomie. He kept his patient a full great dell In houses: by his magike naturell Well couth he fortune the assendent Of his image for his pacient. He knew the cause of every malady, Whether it were of cold, heate, moist, or dry. And whereof engendered was each humour. He was a very parfit practisour; The cause I knew, and of his haime the roote, Anon he gave to the rich man his boot. Full ready had he his apoticaries To send him drugs and his lectuaries; For each of them made other for to winne, Their friendship was not new to beginne. Well he knew the old Esculapius, And Diascorides, and eke Ruffus, And Hippocrates, and Galen, Serapion, Rasis, and Avicen, Aberrois, Damascene, and Constantin, Bernard, Galisden, and Gilbertin Of his diet measurable was he, For it was of no superfluitie; But of great nourishing and digestible. His study was but little on the Bible. In sanguine and in percepolad withall Lined with taffata and with sendall; And yet he was but easy of dispence. He kept that he won in time of pestilence; For gold in phisike is a cordial, Therefore he loved gold speciall.

It appears from this quaint and satirical picture, that, in our Chaucer's days, astrology formed part of a physician's study. It also plainly proves that a disgraceful collusion prevailed between medical practitioners and their apothecaries, mutually to enrich each other at the expense of the patient's purse and constitution. The poet, moreover, seems to tax the faculty with irreligion: that unjust accusation was not uncommon; hence the old adage, "Ubi tres medici, duo athei." To the disgrace of many illiberal persons of the present age, we have known some of our most able and praiseworthy physiologists charged with materialism.

DÆMONOMANIA.

This disease is perhaps the most distressing species of insanity; since, with the exception of the miserable belief of being possessed by the evil spirit, the patient is often in full possession of his other faculties, and will even endeavour to reason with his attendants, with some apparent plausibility, on the very aberration that constitutes the malady.

The word 'dæmon' among the ancients was not considered as specific of an evil spirit; on the contrary, it signified genius, intellect, mind. [Greek: Daimonion], from [Greek: daimôn], meant wisdom, science. The first notions of dæmons were probably brought from Chaldea, whence they spread amongst the Persians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Gales maintains that the original institution of dæmons was an imitation of the Messiah. The Phoenicians called them _Baalim_. So far do these early opinions prevail, that among the Anabaptists we find a sect called Dæmoniac, who believe that devils shall be saved at the end of the world.

Plato gave the name of dæmons to the benevolent spirits who regulated the universe. The Chaldeans and Jews considered them as the causes of all human maladies. Saul was agitated by an evil spirit, and Job and Joram suffered under a similar visitation.

Dæmonomania differs widely from the mental disease called Theomania. In the latter state of insanity the patient fancies that he is placed in communication with the Deity or his angels; in the former, he feels convinced that he has become the prey of the destroyer of mankind.

Under the head of "Unlawful Cures," instances are related of the firm belief in the power of evil spirits to cause various diseases. Perhaps the origin of dæmonomania may be traced to fanatical persecution; never was the malady so common as during the denunciations of Calvin, when torture was frequently resorted to, to make the victims of bigotry renounce a supposed pact with the devil. D'Agessau was right when, in advising the parliament of Paris to repeal all statutes against sorcery, he recommended that dæmoniacs should be handed over to the physician, instead of the priest or the executioner.

The sufferings which dæmoniacs say they endure must be excruciating; so powerful is moral influence over our physical sensations. They will tell you that the devil is drawing them tight, and suffocating them with a cord; that he is pinching and lacerating their entrails, burning and tearing their heart, pouring hot oil or molten lead in their veins, while internal flames are consuming them. Their strength is exhausted, their digestive functions impaired, their appearance soon becomes miserable in the extreme, their countenances pale and haggard: the wretched creatures endeavour to conceal themselves during their scanty meals, or their attempts to enjoy a broken slumber; they are persuaded that they no longer possess a corporeal existence that requires refection or repose,--the evil spirit has borne away their bodies, the devil requires no earthly support; they even deny their sex: they are doomed to live for ever in constant agony. These unfortunate creatures are mostly women. One of them asserts, with horrid imprecations, that she has been the devil's wife for a million of years, and had borne him a numerous family; her body is nothing but a sack made of a devil's skin, and filled with their offsprings in the shape of devouring snakes, toads, and venomous reptiles. She exclaims that her husband constantly urges her to commit murder, theft, and every imaginable crime; and sometimes with bitter tears supplicates her keeper to put on a strait waistcoat, to prevent her from doing evil. Another woman, forty-eight years of age, assures us that she has two devils who have taken up their residence in both her hips, and have grown up to her ears: one of them is black and yellow, the other black, both in the shape of cats. She fills her ears with snuff and grease to satisfy their diabolical cravings. She eats with voracity, but is a perfect skeleton in appearance; the devils consume all, and leave her nothing. They constantly bid her to go and drown herself; but she cannot obey them, since eternity is her doom. They are scarcely sensible of painful agents, and are unconscious of heat, cold, or the inclemency of the weather. Their perspiration, frequently profuse, exhales a most unpleasant odour; hence the vulgar fancy that they smell of the lower regions. This circumstance is the usual consequence of many nervous affections, and arises, most probably, from the foulness of the breath, a natural result of impaired digestion, and from a peculiar acrimony of the cutaneous secretions.

Pinel relates the case of a missionary whose enthusiastic aberrations led him into the horrible belief, that he could only be saved from eternal torments, by what he called a _baptism of blood_. This fatal mania induced him to attempt the life of his wife, who was fortunate to escape from the danger, after he had immolated two of his children, to secure their salvation! Tried for this crime he was sentenced to perpetual confinement in Bicêtre. In his dungeon he fancied himself the _fourth person in the trinity_, maintained that he was sent upon earth to baptize with blood, and all the power of the universe could not affect his life. During ten years' confinement this miserable wretch, betrayed the same insanity whenever religious subjects were touched upon, in all other matters, he reasoned most soundly. His lucid intervals at last became so long in their duration and calm, that it was questioned whether he might not be liberated--until on a Christmas eve, his sanguinary monomania resumed all its intensity, and having by some means or other obtained possession of a leather-cutter's knife, he inflicted a desperate wound on one of his keepers, and cut the throat of two patients who were near them; many other inmates of the establishment would, no doubt, have been sacrificed by the desperate maniac had he not been secured. This case might decidedly be considered one of true dæmonomania.

It has been generally remarked that cases of dæmonomania are more common amongst women than in men. Their greater susceptibility to nervous affections, their warmth of imagination and strong passions, which habit and education compel them to restrain, produce a state of concentration that must cause increased excitement, and render them more liable to those terrific impressions that constitute the disease. These terrors, from false notions of the Deity, make them anticipate in this world the sufferings denounced in the next. One woman has been known to become dæmonomaniac after an intense perusal of the Apocalypse, and another by the constant reading of the works of Thomas à Kempis. Women, moreover, at certain critical periods are subject to great mental depression, which they have not the power to relieve by exciting pursuits, like men. Melancholy succeeds a dull sameness. Religion, viewed in a false light, becomes her refuge; more especially at an advanced period of life, when loss of youth and beauty is bitterly felt, as galled vanity compares the present with the past. Hysteric symptoms are now developed: the passions, which are too frequently increased even to intensity, rather than cooled, by years, prompt her to rebellious thoughts that religion and virtuous feelings strive to restrain; and these powerful agents, acting upon a predisposition morbidly impressionable from ignorance or the errors of education, accelerate the invasion of this cruel malady. Jacobi informs us, that this is still the character which, in some catholic countries, insanity connected with superstition frequently assumes.

Pliny tells us that women are the best subjects for magical experiments; Quintilian is of the same opinion: Saul consults a witch; Bodin, in his calculations, estimates the proportion between wizards and witches as one to fifty. It is, perhaps, owing to these remarks that many ungenerous writers have denied _women_ a soul, as not belonging to _mankind_. There exists a curious anonymous work, published at the close of the sixteenth century, to prove that women are not men, or, in other words, reasonable creatures, and entitled "_Dissertatio perjucunda quâ Anonymus probare nititur Mulieres homines non esse_." Our author upon this principle endeavours to show that women cannot be saved. One Simon Geddicus, a Lutheran divine, wrote a serious confutation of this libel upon the fair sex, in 1595, and promises the ladies an expectation of salvation on their good behaviour. According to a popular tradition among the Mahometans, women are excluded from paradise: St. Augustin, however, calls them the _devout sex_; and in the prayer to the Virgin of the Romish Church we find "_Intercede pro devoto foemineo sexu_." An hypothesis still more absurd was broached by a Doctor Almaricus, a theological Parisian writer of the twelfth century, who advanced that, had it not been for the original sin, every individual of our species would have come into existence a complete man; and that God would have created them by himself, as he created Adam. Our worthy doctor was a disciple of Aristotle, who maintained that woman was a defective animal, and her generation purely fortuitous and foreign to nature. Howbeit, my fair readers will learn with satisfaction that the doctrines of this aforesaid Almaricus were condemned by the church as heretical, and his bones were therefore dug up, and cast into a common sewer, as an _amende honorable_ to the offended ladies.

"A woman," says one of the primitive fathers of the church, "went to the play, and came back with the devil in her; whereupon, when the unclean spirit was urged and threatened, in the office of exorcising, for having dared to attack one of the faithful, 'I have done nothing,' replied he, 'but what is very fair; I found her on my own grounds, and I took possession of her.'"

St. Cyprian informs us, that when he was studying magic, he was particularly intimate with the devil. "I saw the devil himself," he says; "embraced him; I conversed with him, and was esteemed one of those who held a principal rank about him." Who can doubt the assertion of a saint! It appears, that in those wonderful days the devil usually wore a black gown, with a black hat; and it was observed that, whenever he was preaching, his _glutei muscles_ were as cold as ice.

At all times satire has endeavoured to make invidious distinctions between the sexes: this is not fair. Women are generally what men have made them. In a physical, and, consequently, to a certain degree in a moral point of view, their organization is essentially different from ours; therefore, a masculine woman is as intolerable as an effeminate man. The education of females tends in a great measure to increase that susceptibility to trifling excitements, which in after-life urges them to the extremes of good or evil. While the toys and amusements of boys are of a manly nature, a girl is taught to practise upon her darling doll all the arts which a few years after she will practise upon herself. Many intelligent writers have doubted the expediency of giving woman any education beyond the sphere of her domestic pursuits and occupations; Erasmus wrote largely on this subject to Budæus. Vives treats of it in his _Institutio foeminæ Christianæ_; and a German authoress, Madame Schurman, has published a treatise on the problem, "_Num foeminæ Christianæ conveniat studium literarum?_"

It is this nervous flexibility in women that exposes them to that constant succession of emotions which are expressed by a rapid transition from tears to smiles; and, anomalous as it may appear, they are more exposed to fond impressions in their grief than at any other moment; they then feel more helpless, and stand in greater need of consolation. The story of the Matron of Ephesus is not so great a libel on the sex as one might imagine. Their mind is prone to romantic enthusiasm; they delight in the extraordinary, the terrible, and as Madame de Sevigné, who well knew her sex, expresses it, they enjoy in chivalric tales _les grands coups d'épée_. Prudence preventing them too frequently from expressing their thoughts, thinking becomes more intense; and Publius Syrus has said, "_Mulier quæ sola cogitat, malè cogitat_:" but when the suppressed volcano bursts forth, its eruptions are boundless; it is then that one may exclaim, "_Notumque fuerit quid foemina possit_." No passion is more overwhelming than when it has been kept down by dissimulation; opportunity is their curse: Montaigne has too truly said, "_Oh le furieux avantage que l'opportunité_!" and our Denham has beautifully illustrated its fearful circumstances:

Opportunity, like a sudden gust, Hath swell'd my calmer thoughts into a tempest. Accursed opportunity! That works our thoughts into desires; desires To resolutions; those being ripe and quickened, Thou giv'st them birth, and bring'st them forth to action.

It is a perilous ordeal for such to whom the lines of Ovid might apply,

Quæ, quia non liceat, non facit; illa facit.

To what prejudice against women are we to trace their sex having been chosen to represent the Furies, stern and inexorable ministers of Divine wrath; the Harpies, who defiled all they touched; the perilous Sirens; unless it be to woman's fascinations in youth, and envious bitterness in old age--the conventional type of witchcraft? This unhappy selection of woman for working _malefices_ has been attributed to the facility which the devil found in tempting Eve. A witch is supposed by the most learned in the black art to be in compact with Satan, whom she is obliged to obey; whereas a sorcerer commands the devil himself by his knowledge of charms and invocations, but more especially of perfumes that the evil spirits delight in when properly suffumigated, or abhor when maliciously given them to smell. Thus the burning of a fish's liver by Tobit drove the devil into the remote parts of Egypt; and Lilly informs us, that one Evans having raised a spirit at the request of Lord Bothwell and Sir Kenelm Digby, and forgotten his favourite fumigation or incense, the angry elf whipped him up, and carried him from his house in the Minories to Battersea Causeway.

Although fairies are mostly considered juvenile, and many of their kind acts are recorded, yet are they in general mischievous imps; Mr. Lewis describes those he saw in the silver and lead mines of Wales, as only being about half a yard high. As a punishment for their vagaries, all their children are stunted and idiotic; and this accounts for their abominable custom of substituting their own "base elfin breed" for healthy infants. Hence are idiots commonly called changelings.

Dæmoniacs are prone to commit suicide, less from their loathing an irksome life than through fear, not of future torments, but of the renewal or the continuance of their worldly sufferings. Perhaps they may entertain some doubts as to the punishment of another existence, while their actual condition is intolerable; we not unfrequently see desperate men rushing to meet the very fate they dread.