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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    ought to welcome as evolution. The diminution of the power of assimilation by the brain, which is the first result of its commencing decay, renders him incapable of truly receiving or apprehending the lessons of the present, and so deprives him of what is essential to a just compre- hension and judgment of it; so that, although an old man may be helpful in council out of the stores of his experience, he is by no means to be trusted as a leader in action. Let me note, then, that his loss of power of reception or apprehension of the quality and bearing of events is the beginning of that decay which ends by natural descent in the loss of perception which is so marked a character of senile dementia. Again there is in the old man not only an unwillingness or inability to receive, but an incapacity to hold or retain new impressions; the brain has lost both susceptibilitv to impressions and its power of regis- tering them, wherefore they pass away without per- manent effect upon the mind; a condition of things marking the beginning of that decay which passes by a natural descent into the striking loss of memory of recent events in senile dementia. Furthermore, the mind of the old man fails in the power of reproduction or recollection, so that ideas cannot be recalled through the established tracks of association. Lastly, from these three causes combined—failure of apprehension, of memory, and of recollection, there is necessarily a failure of the power to combine old and new into a new product of mental activity-a failure, that is, of productive imagination. This is the commencement of that decay which finally