about this time, had a sharp attack of fever. Dr. Cronin was much alarmed
about him; indeed, he believed him to be dying, and leeched his temples
and bled his right arm. Then he tried calomel, and he said that he had
resolved on opening his temporal artery if his pulse had kept as rapid as
at first it was.

[Illustration: DR. CRONIN
ONE OF THOSE WHO WENT TO SYRIA WITH FRANCIS NEWMAN IN 1830
BY KIND PERMISSION OF MRS. CRONIN
PHOTO BY MESSRS. WEBSTER, CLAPHAM COMMON]

In Aleppo, he tells us in one of his letters home, "madmen are looked on
as sacred characters... there are no madhouses in the land.... Certainly
in England the results of turning all the mad loose would be awful.

"But when one sees the entire satisfaction there is here with so ugly and
revolting a state of things, and the inability people have to conceive the
inconvenience of it... I am driven to speculate.... Is insanity
excessively rare here, so that outrages, if they do occur, are naturally
very few? or is the insanity... always of the imbecile kind? Or is
insanity, at its worst, mollified by the respectful treatment which it
meets, as vicious horses by kindness?

"... Here is a people without lunatic asylums. Well, their lunatics are
few or harmless; what a comfortable coincidence! If insanity among _us_ is
caused by strong passions in one class and by intoxication in another,
while the Turkish populations are nearly free from both... it implies a
higher average morality.... Add to this there are no abandoned women
here."