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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    instances between two classes as it is not to overlook opposing instances. It is of great importance then to recognise a border- land between sanity and insanity, and of greater import- ance still, not resting content with a mere theoretical recognition of it, to study carefully the doubtful cases with which it is peopled. The bearing of such study on our opinions, though at first it may seem to be to confound well-established distinctions, and to make uncertain what before seemed certain, cannot fail in the end to be most beneficial. Assuredly it is a fact of experience that there are many persons who, without being insane, exhibit peculiarities of thought, feeling and character which render them unlike ordinary beings and make them objects of remark among their fellows. They may or may not ever become actually insane, but they spring from families in wbich insanity or other nervous disease exists, and they bear in their temperament the marks of their peculiar heritage: they have in fact a distinct neurotic temperament—a certain neurosis, and some of them a more specially insane temperament—an insane neurosis. We are, it is true, yet without any exact knowledge of the ways of hereditary action, but there can be no doubt of the general fact that individuals do sometimes inherit a positive tendency to a particular nervous disease from which one or other of their parents or ancestors has suffered. The son of an insane person carries in his organization a distinctly greater liability to an out- break of insanity under the ordinary conditions of life