Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    102/356 (page 66)
    CHAPTER III. DIFFERENT FORMS OF MENTAL DERANGEMENT. Idiocy and imbecility—Kleptomania, pyromania, &c, often mark imbecility—Intellectual and affective insanity—General and partial mania—Monomania and melancholia—Dementia—General paralysis of the insane—Objection to the received system of classification according to certain prominent mental symptoms only—The lines on which it is proposed to lay down a better system—The diagnosis of insanity a strictly medical question—Morel's proposed classifica- tion—Skae's proposed classification—The path of future medical inquiry—The physician's duty to declare the truth, however un- popular it may be. The observer who proceeds to examine the different kinds of mental incapacity under which men labour, per- ceives at the outset that he must distinguish cases of absence or weakness of mind from cases in which there is derangement of mind: the former being instances of Idiocy or Imbecility, the latter of Insanity proper. Idiocy is a defect of mind which is either congenital, or due to causes operating during the first few years oi life, before there has been a development of the mental faculties, and may exist in different degrees; the person afflicted with it may have the power of articulate speech, and manifest a limited degree of intelligence, or he may be utterly destitute of any semblance of intelligence and of the power of speech, being little more than a mere vegetating organism. Imbecility is simply weakness of mind owing to defective mental development, and may be of every