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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    what they were used to see in their daily experience, and would probably come away not a little disappointed with the result of the visit: like Mr. Burke, they might ask, at the end of it, where the insane persons were. It is related of that great philosopher, orator, and statesman that, after going through the wards of a large lunatic asylum, he turned to the gentleman who had accompanied him, and said that he had not seen one person whom he considered insane. Thereupon his conductor called one of the patients who had particularly interested Mr. Burke by his ingenious political theories, and touched the sub- ject of his delusions, when he began immediately to talk of the porcupine quills which he imagined to grow from his skin after each meal, and became so incoherent that Mr. Burke was convinced that madmen were not all like the pictures which Hogarth painted of them. For the most part, they are very unlike. Of the in- mates of an asylum, some few might present noticeable peculiarities of appearance, demeanour, and conversation; more would strike the observer by their dull look and listless attitude, as if they had no interest in anything in the heavens above or in the earth beneath; while others would not show, either by their looks or by what they said or did, that they were not as other men are. So much would the casual observer see. The skilled observer would see more, but even he would not find a new world and a new race of beings; he would find man changed, indeed, but not transformed. He would meet, as Esquirol has remarked, with the same ideas, the same errors, the same passions, the same misfortunes: it is the
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