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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    however, there are sometimes delusions with periods of excitement: he has fears that some injury is to be done to him—that he is to be robbed, ruined, or killed, does not sleep, complains and cries out, and is at times maniacal. Paroxysms of noisy excitement, with delusions and apprehensions of the character described, are, indeed, not uncommon features of senile dementia at one stage or other of its course. Such is the course of senile dementia—a gradually increasing decay of mind until there is nothing left that we properly called mind. Let me consider briefly the manner of its beginning, and compare its symptoms with the earliest indications of that natural decay of mental power which accompanies old age. For there is a charac- ter of mind which belongs to old age. The old man is sagacious, prudent, circumspect, sober in conjecture, ripe in judgment, measured in his language as in his move- ments ; he performs his ideas and his movements slowly and cautiously, for he has lost much of the energy and suppleness of his mind and frame ; his imagination is less brilliant and fruitful, and there is a languor of his intel- lectual faculties, although, under the influence of an active stimulus, they may momentarily reach their former height of energy. He ceases to take interest in and to duly appreciate the present; cannot assimilate new things but withdraws himself from participation in new movements, with which he feels no sympathy, to which he feels rather antipathy; is without initiative, shrinks from enter- prise, accepts only the lessons of the past, is the laudator imports acti, and brands often as revolution what he s 2