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A hundred and fifty years ago: Remarkable cases of senile delirium. Practitioner March 2018;262(1813):33

150 years ago: Remarkable cases of senile delirium

22 Mar 2018Registered users

I was sent for early in the morning, and was told she had not had any sleep during the night, but had been talking incessantly. When I saw her she was sitting up in the bed and was rambling incoherently, but everything she uttered was in rhyme, and the ingenuity she displayed in promptly finding the rhyme was very remarkable. During the whole of her illness, which lasted a week, I never once found her at fault in this respect, and she never was more at a loss to give utterance to her thoughts in rhyme than if she had expressed them in the ordinary mode of conversation. She gradually sank, apparently from exhaustion and having talked herself to death.

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