I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.
I didn’t stop talking immediately. I talked right up until the day I remembered everything that happened, over a year later. That was the day I went silent. It wasn’t a ploy or a tactic. It wasn’t psychosomatic. It was a choice. And I made it.
[I plan] to see, hear, touch, and destroy everything in my path, including beets, rutabagas, and most random vegetables, but excluding yams, as I am absolutely terrified of yams... Actually, I think my fear of yams began in my early youth, when many of my young comrades pelted me with same for singing songs of far-off lands and deep blue seas in a language closely resembling that of the common sow. My psychosis was further impressed into my soul as I reached adolescence, when, while skipping through a field of yams, light-heartedly tossing flowers into the stratosphere, a great yam-picking machine tore through the fields, pursuing me to the edge of the great plantation, where I escaped by diving into a great ditch filled with a mixture of water and pig manure, which may explain my tendency to scream, "Here come the Martians! Hide the eggs!" every time I have pork. But I digress. The fact remains that I cannot rationally deal with yams, and pigs are terrible conversationalists.
Perhaps the most marked feature of influenza, and certainly the one which victims have learned to dread most, is the prolonged debility and nervous depression that frequently follow an attack. It was remarked by Nothnagel that "Influenza produces a specific nervous toxin which by its action on the cortex produces psychoses." In the Paris epidemic of 1890 the suicides increased 25%, a large proportion of the excess being attributed to nervous prostration caused by the disease. Dr Rawes, medical superintendent of St Luke's hospital, says that of insanities traceable to influenza melancholia is twice as frequent as all other forms of insanity put together. Other common after-effects are neuralgia, dyspepsia, insomnia, weakness or loss of the special senses, particularly taste and smell, abdominal pains, sore throat, rheumatism and muscular weakness. The feature most dangerous to life is the special liability of patients to inflammation of the lungs. This affection must be regarded as a complication rather than an integral part of the illness. The following diagram gives the annual death-rate per million in England and Wales, and is taken from an article by Dr Arthur Newsholme in _The Practitioner_ (January 1907). Entry: 1890
GENOVESI, ANTONIO (1712-1769), Italian writer on philosophy and political economy, was born at Castiglione, near Salerno, on the 1st of November 1712. He was educated for the church, and, after some hesitation, took orders in 1736 at Salerno, where he was appointed professor of eloquence at the theological seminary. During this period of his life he began the study of philosophy, being especially attracted by Locke. Dissatisfied with ecclesiastical life, Genovesi resigned his post, and qualified as an advocate at Rome. Finding law as distasteful as theology, he devoted himself entirely to philosophy, of which he was appointed extraordinary professor in the university of Naples. His first works were _Elementa Metaphysicae_ (1743 et seq.) and _Logica_ (1745). The former is divided into four parts, Ontosophy, Cosmosophy, Theosophy, Psychosophy, supplemented by a treatise on ethics and a dissertation on first causes. The _Logic_, an eminently practical work, written from the point of view of Locke, is in five parts, dealing with (1) the nature of the human mind, its faculties and operations; (2) ideas and their kinds; (3) the true and the false, and the various degrees of knowledge; (4) reasoning and argumentation; (5) method and the ordering of our thoughts. If Genovesi does not take a high rank in philosophy, he deserves the credit of having introduced the new order of ideas into Italy, at the same time preserving a just mean between the two extremes of sensualism and idealism. Although bitterly opposed by the partisans of scholastic routine, Genovesi found influential patrons, amongst them Bartolomeo Intieri, a Florentine, who in 1754 founded the first Italian or European chair of political economy (commerce and mechanics), on condition that Genovesi should be the first professor, and that it should never be held by an ecclesiastic. The fruit of Genovesi's professorial labours was the _Lezioni di Commercio_, the first complete and systematic work in Italian on economics. On the whole he belongs to the "Mercantile" school, though he does not regard money as the only form of wealth. Specially noteworthy in the _Lezioni_ are the sections on human wants as the foundation of economical theory, on labour as the source of wealth, on personal services as economic factors, and on the united working of the great industrial functions. He advocated freedom of the corn trade, reduction of the number of religious communities, and deprecated regulation of the interest on loans. In the spirit of his age he denounced the relics of medieval institutions, such as entails and tenures in mortmain. Gioja's more important treatise owes much to Genovesi's lectures. Genovesi died on the 22nd of September 1769. Entry: GENOVESI
_Olfactory Region of Cortex._--There is phylogenetic evidence that the development of the _cortex cerebri_ first occurred in connexion with the distance-receptors for chemical stimuli--that is, expressed with reference to psychosis, in connexion with olfaction. The olfactory apparatus even in mammals still exhibits a neural architecture of primitive pattern. The cell which conducts impulses to the brain from the olfactory membrane in the nose resembles cells in the skin of the earthworm, in that its cell-body lies actually amid the epithelium of the skin-surface and is not deeply buried near or in the central nervous organ. Further, it has at its external end tiny hairlets such as occur in specially receptive-cells but not usually in purely nervous cells. Hence we must think that one and the same cell by its external end receives the environmental stimulus and by its deep end excites the central nervous organ. The cell under the stimulation of the environmental agent will therefore generate in itself a nervous impulse. This is the clearest instance we have of a neurone being actually excited under natural circumstances by an agent of the environment _directly_, not indirectly. The deep ends of these olfactory neurones having entered the central nervous organ come into contact with the dendrites of large neurones, called, from their shape, mitral. In the dog, an animal with high olfactory sense, the axone of each olfactory neurone is connected with five or six mitral cells. In man each olfactory neurone is connected with a single mitral cell only. We may suppose that the former arrangement conduces to intensification of the central reaction by summation. At the same time it is an arrangement which could tend to smother sharp differentiation of the central reaction in respect to locality of stimulus at the receptive surface. Considering the diffuse way in which olfactory stimuli are applied in comparison, for instance, with visual, the exact localization of the former can obviously yield little information of use for locating the exact position of their source. On the other hand, in the case of visual stimuli the locus of incidence, owing to the rectilinear propagation of light, can serve with extraordinary exactitude for inferences as to the position of their source. The adaptation of the neural connexions of the two organs in this respect is therefore in accord with expectation. Entry: 2
Besides the regions instanced above, in the limbic (olfactory), occipital (visual), and temporal (auditory) lobes, as exhibiting precocity of development, there is a region showing similar precocity in the fronto-parietal portion of the hemisphere. This is the region which in the Primates includes the large _central fissure_ (sometimes called the fissure of Rolando). To it fibres are traced which seem to continue a path of conduction that began with afferent tracts belonging to the spinal cord, and tracts which there is reason to think conduct impulses from the receptor-organs of skin and muscles. The part of the cortex immediately behind the _central fissure_ seems to be the main cortical goal for these upward-conducting paths. That _post-central_ strip of cortex would in this view bear to these paths a relation similar to that which the occipital and temporal regions bear to afferent tracts from the retina and the cochlea. There are observations which associate impaired tactual sense and impaired perception of posture and movement of a limb with injury of the _central region_ of the cortex. But there are a number also which show that the motor defect which is a well-ascertained result of injury of the _pre-central_ gyrus is sometimes unaccompanied by any obvious defect either of touch or of muscular sense. It seems then that the motor centres of this region are closely connected with the centres for cutaneous and muscular sense, yet are not so closely interwoven with them that mechanical damage inflicted on the one of necessity heavily damages the other as well. There is evidence that the sensory cortex in this region lies posterior to that which has been conveniently termed the "motor." These latter in the monkey and the man-like apes and man lie in front of the central fissure: the sensory lie probably behind it. A.W. Campbell has found changes in the cortex of the post-central convolution ensuing in the essentially sensory disease, _tabes dorsalis_, a disease in which degeneration of sensory nerve-fibres of the muscular sense and of the skin senses is prominent. He considers that in man and the man-like apes the part of the post-central gyrus which lies next to and enters into the _central fissure_ is concerned with simpler sensual recognitions, while the adjoining part of that convolution farther back is a "psychic region" concerned with more complex psychosis connected with the senses of skin and muscle. His subdivision of the post-central gyrus is based on histological differences which he discovers between its anterior and its posterior parts and on the above-described analogous differentiation of a "sensory" from a "psychic" part in the visual region of cortex. Entry: 2
_Cerebral Control over Lower Nervous Centres._--There accrues to the brain, especially to the fore-brain of higher Vertebrates, another function besides that of grafting psychical qualities upon the reactions of the nervous system. This function is exhibited as power to control in greater or less measure the pure reflexes enacted by the system. These pure reflexes have the character of fatality, in the sense that, given a particular stimulus, a particular reaction unvaryingly follows; the same group of muscles or the same gland is invariably thrown into action in the same way. Removal of the fore-brain, i.e. of that portion of the central nervous organ to which psychosis is adjunct, renders the nervous reactions of the animal more predictable and less variable. The animal, for instance, a dog, is given over more completely to simple reflexes. Its skin is touched and it scratches the spot, its jaw is stroked and it yawns, its rump is rubbed and it shakes itself, like a dog coming out of water; and these reactions occur fatally and inopportunely, for instance, when food is being offered to it, when the dog normally would allow no such insignificant skin stimuli as the above to defer his appropriate reaction. Goltz relates the behaviour of a dog from which almost the whole fore-brain had been removed. The animal lived healthily under the careful treatment accorded it. At feeding time a little quinine (bitter) added to its sop of meat and milk led to the morsels, after being taken into the mouth, being at once and regularly rejected. None was ever swallowed, nor was the slightest hesitation in their rejection ever obtained by any coaxing or command, or encouragement of the animal by the attendant who constantly had charge of it. On the other hand, directly an undoctored piece had entered the mouth it was swallowed at once. Goltz threw to his own house-dog a piece of the same doctored meat. The creature wagged its tail and took it eagerly, then after receiving it into its mouth pulled a wry face and hesitated, astonished. But on encouragement to go on eating it the dog did so. Perhaps it deemed it unseemly to appear ungrateful to the giver and reject the gift. It overcame its reflex of rejection, and by its self-control gave proof of the intact cerebrum it possessed. Entry: 2
HYDROSPHERE (Gr. [Greek: hydôr], water, and [Greek: sphaira], sphere), in physical geography, a name given to the whole mass of the water of the oceans, which fills the depressions in the earth's crust, and covers nearly three-quarters of its surface. The name is used in distinction from the atmosphere, the earth's envelope of air, the lithosphere (Gr. [Greek: lithos], rock) or solid crust of the earth, and the centrosphere or interior mass within the crust. To these "spheres" some writers add, by figurative usage, the terms "biosphere," or life-sphere, to cover all living things, both animals and plants, and "psychosphere," or mind-sphere, covering all the products of human intelligence. Entry: HYDROSPHERE
In lower vertebrates it is not clear that consciousness in primitive form requires always the co-operation of the fore-brain. In them the fore-brain does not seem a _conditio sine qua non_ for psychosis--so far as we may trust the rather hazardous inferences which study of the behaviour of fish, &c., allows. And the difference between higher and lowlier animal forms in respect of the fore-brain as a condition for psychosis becomes more marked when the Arthropoda are examined. The behaviour of some Insecta points strongly to their possessing memory, rudimentary in kind though it may be. But in them no homologue of the fore-brain of vertebrates can be indisputably made out. The head ganglia in these Invertebrates may, it is true, be analogous in function in certain ways to the brain of vertebrates. Some experiments, not plentiful, indicate that destruction of these head ganglia induces deterioration of behaviour such as follows loss of psychical functions in cases of destruction of the fore-brain in vertebrates. Though, therefore, we cannot be clear that the head ganglia of these Invertebrates are the same structure morphologically as the brain of vertebrates, they seem to hold a similar office, exercising analogous functions, including psychosis of a rudimentary kind. We can, therefore, speak of the head ganglia of Arthropods as a brain, and in doing so must remember that we define by physiological evidence rather than by morphological. Entry: 2