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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    grieve over his sad fall from virtue; after a time they hear that he is in the police court accused of assault or of stealing money or jewelry, and are not greatly astonished that his vices have brought him to such a pass. Examined by a competent physician, he is discovered to have a slight peculiarity of articulation and perhaps an in- equality of size of the pupils, symptoms which, in con- junction with the previous history, enable the physician to say with positive certainty that he is struck with a disease which, sapping by degrees his intellect and strength, will within no long time destroy his mental and bodily powers, and finally his life. Our knowledge is so exact that we can do what is the best test of a science—predict with certainty what will happen. The dissipation, the speculation, and the theft itself were, as they often are, the first symptoms of general paralysis of the insane. Plainly, common sense without special experience could have small chance of coming to a right conclusion in such a case. The example will furthermore serve to show of what little service a classi- fication by mental sj^mptoms only is, and what little in- formation we get when wo are obliged to be content with such a classification; for in the early stages of the disease it would be necessary to describe them as those of affective or moral insanity, at a later stage as those of intellectual insanity, and finally as those of dementia. Thus one patient might, in the course of a short time, run through all the classes of symptoms while suffering from one and the same disease. So plain is this, and so cbaracteristic are the mental and bodily features of