"Illustrations of Madness... Embellished with a Curious Plate"

Illustration of the "air loom" imagined by 18th-century paranoiac James Tilly Matthews, who believed that such a device was being used to torture him from a distance.

The full title of the 1810 book which contains this image is: Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate.