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.

    298/356 (page 262)
    We observe the same gradations of failing memory in febrile diseases, after injuries to the head, after apoplexy sometimes, and in persons broken down by intemperance. Very notable in the earlier stages of febrile diseases, and in debility after acute diseases, is the first stage of failing memory in which attention cannot be directed to a long train of thought, or to anything requiring a continued effort of mind. At a later stage of fever, it is evident that impressions do not leave any remembrance, though at the time there appears to be a perfect perception; there is apprehension followed by complete forgetfulness. At a still later period external impressions are not perceived at all, or are perceived in a manner which cannot convey any distinct notion of their relations, while trains of ideas are believed to be realities. With this incapacity of present apprehension there may be observed, as in senile de- mentia, a wonderful activity of past ideas and the revival of memories which had been lost, so that a person in delirium will sometimes rave in a language of which he can scarcely remember a word when in health. Lastly, a state of stupor supervenes in which the mind is entirely cut off from the external world, and in wbich there is no internal activity, or not more than the occasional flicker of an expiring idea. In the act of dying, when death is not sudden, the same stages of failing memory and failing mind are often passed through; and whosoever would realise what his probable mental state will be in that last scene of all, when he has the stage all to himself, and easily excites interest, however poorly he plays his part, may help himself to do so by a study of these successive stages of