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.

    79/356 (page 43)
    of an attack of insanity. Instances like these indicate that the kind of morbid change which is the physical condition of deranged function in the sensory and motor nerve centres is similar to that which is the condition of morbid function in the mind centres; however that may be, they certainly warrant the conclusion that disease of mind is a derangement which is nowise metaphysical, but one strictly comparable with such other nervous disorders as neuralgia and convulsions. If we once for all clearly realize this just pathological conception of the nature of mental derangement, it will deliver us from a multitude of vain speculations, and we shall find it of essential use in our endeavours to arrive at correct opinions with regard to the responsibility of insane persons. There is another degenerate condition, if it be not actual disease, which has close relation to insanity, either as cause or effect—namely, dipsomania. A host of facts might be brought forward to prove that drunkenness in parents, especially that form of drunkenness known as dipsomania, which breaks out from time to time in un- controllable paroxysms, is a cause of idiocy, suicide or insanity in their offspring. It would seem to be truly a nervous disease, a kind of insanity; in its outbreaks it displays the periodicity which is a common character of nervous diseases; and it exhibits its close kinship to insanity not only by the fact that when occurring in one generation it may become the occasion of mental derange- ment or suicide in the next generation, but conversely by the fact that insanity in the parent may occasion dipso- mania in the offspring.