p. 83 | Suspended Thought

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 27, 1872

Suspended Thought.

REV. MR. HENDRIX, when visiting the patients in a Canadian hospital, a number of years since, discovered, therein, a man who appeared to be perfectly demented, but otherwise in good health. Inquiring into the cause of his malady, he was informed that it was occasioned by a depression of the skull upon the brain, by a blow from the falling limb of a tree. Procuring surgical aid, Mr. Hendrix caused the depressed skull to be raised to its natural position, when the patient uttered the concluding word of a sentence that he had begun to address his son, with whom, fourteen years before, he was splitting rails under the tree where he received the injury that deprived him of his senses:—“Put in the ____ wedge.”

This I think, is a remarkable example of suspended thought. For fourteen years he had lived perfectly unconscious of the loss of a moment of time. But he ate, drank, slept, awoke, and moved about; but how? Simply as a machine. Like the clock, the human mechanism had been wound up, or set in motion, and must run its allotted time, though a part of its complicated machinery, unessential to its longevity, should cease to move. The hunger, and the act of supplying its demands, were but a part of the natural movements of the intricate machine.