The human centrifuge

摘要

"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 had 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.