The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-11-17
A QUEER TALE.
BY JOHN A. JOYCE.

III Is rare Cnlng 1Or recovered Iu-
natic to write the history of his own
arrangement. Science and skill in
every age have struggled to master
the marvellous brain of the maniac and
ascertain the cure for diseased mind.
The body, the tangible part of man,
can be easily nursed back from dying,
skeleton form to robust health, but
the intangible, wild, spectral mind has
no chains to bind its rushing pinions
and no sure cure to quiet the crum-
bling fabric of imagination. When ]
look over vanished years and count the
milestones along my rugged road of
life l approach with fear the fiery pill
lar that lit up the glowing realms of
my lost mind. should not speak now
upon this phase of my checkered Ca
reer were it not that sense of duty
impels me to give my experience
through the Tribune for the benefit of
the friends and relatives of lunatics,
as we'll as to impress attendants and
doctors having charge of the insane
with proper sense of their RESPONSE
bility.
/ say it without fear of medical con-
tradiction that full fiedged lunatic
was never cured by brutal force or
unreasonable restraint. All human
beings have minds as varied as their
features, and meat for one is poison for
another. In the days of Calico, Tasso,
and the Prisoner of Chillon, it was
considered the correct thing to put the
insane in deep dungeon, chained to a
stone pillar, shut out from the sun
light, with no music to cheer the
weary hours of day or lonely moments
of night save the clanking of their
chains or the wild echoes of their
melancholy means. asa .sss.ss n. . .
His bread was such as captives' tears
Have moistened many thousand years,
Since man first pent his fellow. men
Like brutes within an iron den.; -"--'
Things have changed but little since
those cruel, ancient days. All over
the world to-day thousands of those
poor human creatures, lost to friends
and memory, are languishing in mad
houses and aimshouses, tortured by ig-
norant attendants, encased in straight
jackets, pent up in padded rooms,
doused in shivering baths and shower
chairs, strapped to iron cots, or tor
tured by the lash of some petty
tyrant who imagines that brutal blows
can subdue the mind.
All, friends, how little doctors and
their assistants know about the cure
for insanity! All the medical plati-
tudes ever written by 80 called scien-
tific gentlemen have not touched the
outer edge of the insane mind. 1t Is q
terra t'acognita to all save those who
inhabit the realm.
The leaves that tremble in the for
est, the sands that glisten ON the sea-
shore, and the stars that twinkle In
the blue vault of heaven, multiplied
by incalculable millions, cannot COM
pare with the various ideas that bub-
BILE up in the mind of the maniac.
Every human being with q grain of
common sense is liable to become crazy.
And / might say that there is not
man or woman living that is not
somewhat crazy on some pet subject.
The brightest minds that have ever
been ushered into life were touched by
the spell of insanity; and might say
that every great undertaking in this
world has been invented, discovered
or conjured up by the brain of q per-
SON who had the insanity of deep
thought and the unfaltering mania Of
desperate perseverance.
shall now proceed directly to my
own case, as very distinctly remem-
bered to this moment.
In the spring of 1860, at the age of
eighteen, q vivid fash of imagination
shot across my brain like zig-zag
lightning from blue sky. told my
father, who was then living near
Mount Sterling, KY, that I wished to
take . course In Dook-keeping at
Dufss Commercial college, In Pitts
burg, and to this end induced him to
give me hundred dollars to start for
the "Smoky City, went to Cincin-
natl, and thence by boat to Pittsburg.
On my trip up the river had the
widest and strongest feelings about
life and tho small, creeping, human
things that crawled over the earth.
The idea Of running the world and the
wheels Of traffic by perpetual motion
sprang into my mind. I felt sure that
tho real problem Of life was SOLVED
force superior to gravitationi New