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.

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    various physical causes and symptoms of the disease; it has strengthened the notion that insanity is a disease of mind, without at the same time bringing into pro- minence the fact that it is a disease of body also. No wonder it has been said that any one of good common sense is as competent as a medical man to determine whether a person is insane or not. This assertion would not be dispnted if we could only guarantee the application of true common sense, which proceeds from experience and knowledge, and in any department of scientific inquiry is the common sense of those who have these qualifications; the so-called common sense of any one not so enlightened is very apt to be common prejudice springing from ignorance; and assuredly it would argue in such a one a very uncommon sense, if he was, without special experience, as competent as those who had laboured hard to inform themselves by a patient study of the disease in all its stages. Is it not truly strange that common sense should ever have been declared to be the measure of that the essence of which is that it is not sense —that it is utterly opposed to all the experience of sanity ? An example will serve best to show how necessary to the formation of aright conclusion is observation informed by experience. A man who has been hitherto temperate in all his habits, prudent and industrious in business, and exemplary in the relations of life, undergoes a great change of character, gives way to dissipation of all sorts, launches into reckless speculations in business, and becomes indif- ferent to his wife, his family, the obligations of his posi- tion ; his surprised friends see only the effects of vice, and