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20
Inquiries into Human Faculty
they hardly distinguish between heat and cold, and their sense of pain is
so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is. In
their dull lives, such pain as can be excited in them may literally be
accepted with a welcome surprise. During a visit to Earlswood Asylum I
saw two boys whose toe-nails had grown into the flesh and had been
excised by the surgeon. This is a horrible torture to ordinary persons, but
the idiot lads were said to have shown no distress during the operation; it
was not necessary to hold them, and they looked rather interested at what
was being done.
[1]
I also saw a boy with the scar of a severe wound on his
wrist; the story being that he had first burned himself slightly by accident,
and, liking the keenness of the new sensation, he took the next
opportunity of repeating the experience, but, idiot-like, he overdid it.
The trials I have as yet made on the sensitivity of different persons
confirms the reasonable expectation that it would on the whole be highest
among the intellectually ablest. At first, owing to my confusing the quality
of which I am speaking with that of nervous irritability, I fancied that
women of delicate nerves who are distressed by noise, sunshine, etc.,
would have acute powers of discrimination. But this I found not to be the
case. In morbidly sensitive persons both pain and sensation are induced by
lower stimuli than in the healthy, but the number of just perceptible grades
of sensation between them is not necessarily different.
I found as a rule that men have more delicate powers of discrimination
than women, and the business experience of life seems to confirm this
view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so I understand are the
tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and the like. These latter
occupations are well salaried, because it is of the first moment to the
merchant that he should be rightly advised on the real value of what he is
about to purchase or to sell. If the sensitivity of women were superior to
that of men, the self-interest of merchants would lead to their being
[1]
See “Remarks on Idiocy,” by E. Graham, M.D., Medical Journal, January 16, 1875.
