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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    must come to a conclusion are many of them the same. Unfortunately while the lawyer can see and appreciate the symptoms which indicate crime, he cannot appreciate the symptoms which mark disease; these he overlooks or ignores, for they have no meaning to him; and he is apt to think that the physician who does perceive them and recognise their serious meaning, is simply making crime evidence of insanity. The theft in the early stages of general paralysis is a sufficiently palpable fact; who but a physician familiar with the disease can recognise the inequality of pupils and the peculiarity of articulation which mark the beginning of incurable brain-disease, and give the true interpretation of the theft ? Insanity being a disease which cannot exist apart from disorder of bodily organs and functions, the diagnosis of it must belong to the physician; for he alone is competent to investigate and appreciate these disorders. Those who would take from him the diagnosis might as well claim to take the treatment of the disease. The late M. Morel, who was the distinguished phy- sician of the asylum of St. Yon, near Eouen, some years ago propounded a new system of classifying insanity, which, although not available for practical purposes and easily shown to be defective as a theoretical system, had the merit of expressing the tendencies of modern inquiries in a systematic form. His aim was the classification of mental disorders in relation to their causes, and he arranged all forms of them in six principal groups, each group having its different subdivisions into classes or varieties. The mention of these groups will serve fitly