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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    we cannot at present explain the connection of. The lesson which they teach us may, however, be profitably applied to the study of the function of the higher nerve- centres—those which minister to mind : an active morbid idea in the mind may excite into activity another idea which has no discoverable relation to it in consciousness, and this last may realise itself in some deed, which, so far as the primary idea is concerned, seems inexplicable ; there may, in fact, be a synergy of idea, as there is notably a synergy of movement, or a sympathy of sensation. A poor woman, the mother of two children, became depressed, and fancied that she was persecuted ; she was also suicidal, but went about her daily duties with regularity. One day, however, without seeming any- wise different from usual, she seized one of her children, and beat its head against the floor until it was dead; and she would have done the same with the other child had she not been prevented. She was sent to an asylum, where she recovered after a time ; but she never could tell how it was that she had killed her child, when she was so fond of it. The case is one of a class of cases in which frightful impulses spring up in the diseased mind, and drive the individual to a deed of violence; they may be as little within control as are the convulsions of epilepsy, and the origin of them perhaps as little within the individual's knowledge as the origin of the impulse which entered the unfortunate herd of swine, and drove them over a steep place into the sea, so that they were drowned, was within their knowledge. Q