"His countenance attached to saturnine
blackness, the eyes, suffused with bile, were immovably fixed on the
ground, the limbs seemed deprived of their locomotive powers, the action
of the lungs, and the circulation retarded, the tongue parched and
silent, and the whole man resembled an automaton." In Dr Cox's opinion,
his patient was in the grip of a "melancholy stupor". As the director of
one of the largest private asylums in Georgian England, Joseph Mason
Cox was mad-doctor to the better off and bad just the thing to rouse
this poor soul from the depths of his depression. Cox, one of the first
qualified doctors in England to specialise in mental disorders, had
invented a new sort of treatment: a human centrifuge. A spin in Cox's "circulating swing" was said to shock the madness from a man.
GOOD wine, a relaxing massage and soothing
music: for Asclepiades, a Greek doctor practising in 1st century Rome,
these were the best remedies for insanity. Kind and gentle treatment was
far better than chains and beatings. And the best therapy of all was
sleep -- preferably natural, wholesome slumber rather than that induced
by poppy juice or other mind-altering preparations. To encourage a
better sort of sleep, Asclepiades invented one of the most enlightened
pieces of medical technology: a swinging bed.
If gentle swinging was effective, then, how
much more might be achieved by rapid rotation? At the start of the 19th
century, a radical variation on the swinging bed began to appear in
asylums across Europe. However, patients treated in Joseph Cox's
circulating chair found the experience anything but relaxing. Tied down
and spun round at speed, they turned pale, threw up and passed out. It
was a far cry from Asclepiades's soothing swing, but it got results.
Even the most disturbed patients became calm and easy to control. Cox
believed any fear or discomfort was all to the good, helping to distract
a patient's mind from mad thoughts. Best of all, it encouraged deep and
therapeutic sleep.
Down the centuries ideas about how to deal
with the insane veered from one extreme to another: some advocated
kindness, others believed that physical restraint and intimidation were
more effective. Most asylums had been little more than places to lock up
the mad, but by the late 18th century attitudes were changing. Cox was
one of a new breed of mad-doctor. He was not a jailer or a manager of
maniacs, but a medical professional who had studied mental disorders and
was prepared to devote his life to investigating better ways to treat
them.
The concept of swinging as therapy had gone in
and out of fashion ever since Asclepiades. Towards the end of the 18th
century, James Carmichael Smith, a Commissioner for Madhouses and
physician to Britain's most illustrious madman --King George III --
revived the notion. He suggested swinging could be used to subdue "the
nervous influence" and "the principle of irritability" in many sorts of
madness.
The idea of the human centrifuge
sprang from the fertile mind of Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and
inventor, Darwin was interested in the nature of disease and how to cure
bodies rather than minds. He was a great believer in the healing power
of sleep. But how best to induce it? Darwin's friend James Brindley
provided inspiration, Although famous as a canal engineer, Brindley
started out as a millwright: he'd heard that if a man lay on a millstone
as it turned, he soon fell asleep. "The centrifugal motion of the head
and feet must accumulate the blood in both those extremities of the
body, and thus compress the brain," Darwin reasoned.
The same effect, he suggested, could be
achieved more comfortably in a bed suspended "so as to whirl the patient
round with his head most distant from the centre of rotation". Darwin
enlisted another friend, steam pioneer lames Watt, to draw up designs
for a "rotative couch", a bed attached to an arm that revolved around a
vertical shaft fixed to the floor and ceiling. Darwin never built his
revolving bed. It was more suited to a hospital than the parlour of a
man in private practice, he said. When Cox took over his family's asylum
in 1788, he was ideally placed to test it.
Cox was soon singing the praises of rapid
rotation. By the time he published his Practical Observations on
Insanity in 1804 he had considerable experience of it. Whirling his
patients round at speed worked wonders, he wrote. Like Darwin, Cox
believed in the restorative powers of sleep. He also believed that if
you provoked some sort of physical crisis in the body, it would shock
the mind back to normality, at least temporarily. Spinning certainly had
a drastic effect on the body. At first the motion made patients feel
nauseous; up the speed and they vomited then lost control of bladder and
bowels. Some bled from the nose and ears; some had convulsions. Many
passed out.
It was a sizeable shock to the system and
invariably had a calming effect. According to Cox, even the most
demented, violent patients would be left quiet and easy to control
without resort to drugs. "The slumbers thus procured differ as much from
those induced by opiates as the rest of the hardy sons of labour from
that of the pampered, intemperate debauchee."
The simplest version of Cox's device consisted
of a Windsor chair suspended from a hook in the ceiling and rotated
with the help of ropes around the chair legs. The patient, Cox advised,
should be secured in a straitjacket and "prevented from falling out of
the chair by a broad leather strap, passed round the waist and buckled
to the spars, while another strap to each leg may fasten it to the front
ones of the chair." A more sophisticated version was a bed or chair
attached to an arm that revolved around a vertical shaft, much like
Darwin's concept. "The necessary motion may be given by the hand of an
attendant pushing or pulling the extremity of the projecting arm, with
greater or lesser force, each time it circulates, but by a little simple
additional machinery any degree of velocity might be given, and the
motion communicated with the utmost facility."
By 1813 Cox was promoting spinning as a safe
and effective treatment for most kinds of madness. "No remedy is capable
of effecting so much with so little hazard. In almost every case it
will produce perfect quiescence, allay all irritation, silence the most
vociferous and loquacious." It was, he confessed, harder to make a
madman giddy than a sane one, "but there are very few of them who can
resist the action of a continued whirling with increased velocity,
especially if suddenly stopped. The shock this gives to the system and
the alarm it excites is not easily conceived by those who have never
witnessed it."
Cox's chair became hugely popular in asylums
in both the UK and elsewhere. In Ireland, William Hallaran, who ran the
Cork Lunatic Asylum, was a great enthusiast, so much so he built a
version that could take four patients at a time and spun at 100
revolutions a minute. The effect was much as Cox described: patients
felt sick, threw up and later fell into a deep sleep, from which,
Hallaran maintained, they awoke with their mad ideas "totally altered".
The device, he wrote, rendered his asylum "remarkable for its
tranquillity…regularity and order".
After a few decades Cox's chairs began to fall
out of favour. Some doctors suspected they did little more than exhaust
patients into submission. The treatment was dangerous -- some patients
died. By the end of the century the chairs had been consigned to
museums. in the meantime the human centrifuge emerged
in a new guise. When Austrian physiologist Robert Bárány carried out his
ground breaking research into the role of the inner ear in our sense of
balance, he used a piece of equipment that differed from Cox's spinning
chair in just one respect: it was called the Bárány chair. In 1914, his
research won him a Nobel prize.
Further reading: "Cox's chair: 'a moral and a
medical mean in the treatment of maniacs'" by Nicholas Wade and others,
History of Psychiatry, vol 16, p 73
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