Any ideas? Unknown cause of death.

[ceitidh.]

I'm hoping that amongst all of you out there, that someone will be able to help me with this one. I have an ancestor who was committed into the Inverness District Asylum, and who then died in said Asylum in May 1881. However, i'm having real problems deciphering what the cause of death was! It looks to me like "Lilonomania", but google searches have revealed absolutely nothing and I have thus far had no luck in discovering what it actually is. I've attatched an image from the death certificate - any ideas or thoughts would be most welcomed!
   
ta,

ceitidh.

[griz]

Looks like Monomania to me,  and TB for one month.

[LizzieW]

Pneumonia 1 year
Phthisis 1 month (that's TB)

Lizzie

[Joyful]

In those days I'm sure a person suffering from pneumonia would have been dead before a year had passed.  :-\Monomania is a pathological obsession with one idea or subject - could easily suffer with it for 12 months and I suppose depending what the obsession was it could be a cause of death.

The death was in an asylum so monomania sounds likely and that's what it looks like to me. The other of course is TB.

Hope it helps

Joy

[ceitidh.]

Ah. Do you know, now that I look at it, I don't know why I never thought of that myself or saw it for that matter! Monomania does sound the most likely, although I would have thought that the TB would be a more probable cause of death. Having said that, on another death entry on the same certificate, there was a poor woman whose cause of death is listed as being "Moral Insanity and Heart Disease"!

Thank you all very much, thats another mystery solved!

Ceitidh.

[LizzieW]

Joy - Yes it's obviously monomania now I've looked at it more carefully.  I wonder if that's what we call obsessive compulsive disorder nowadays.

Lizzie

[Joyful]

It could be Lizzie but I think that OCD is more about repetitive physical actions - washing hands repeatedly etc whereas, from my undersanding, monomania is more about being convinced about some idea that has no basis in reality. Does that make sense

Joy

[LizzieW]

Joy - Yes I think so, I don't know anything about mental illnesses.  I can't believe that whatever the condition was, it would cause death.  I would have thought the TB would have been the main cause of death.

Lizzie

[pjbuk007]

Monomania it is!

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/MHHGLO.HTM#monomania

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/xmad1844.htm#Monomania

Give a partial etymology of the term.  This site is good on other aspects of early asylums and mental illness.

It really is hard to equate these old terms to modern diagnoses, and anyway, they were often used rather loosely.  And remember, sometimes people were sent to asylums for reasons other than true mental illness.

However, monomania could be  part of a schizo-affective disorder, until recently known as "schizophrenia".  I believe it was used for those  people who insist that they are Napoleon's daughter but otherwise might be quite normal.