Note 240 — Chapter VI
Hugh J. C. Beavan translation
It would appear from the documents collected by Nott (Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races, Mobile, 1844, compare Boudin, Géogr. Méd., vol. ii, p. 144), that as we advance towards the upper part of the Northern States, madness becomes very frequent among the Negroes. It reaches the proportion of one case of insanity among twenty-eight sane persons in Massachusetts and Maine. We hesitate in acknowledging climateric influence, because the number of cases seems to increase relatively to the degree of instruction among the people; not that madness depends on education, but because it finds out a great number of cases of which we should otherwise have been ignorant, as often happens in the east among a less enlightened people.