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.

    80/356 (page 44)
    In pointing out the relations between mental and other nervous diseases, I have noticed instances of so-called functional diseases only, that is, diseases in which after death we fail to find, by the means of investigation which we have at our command, any actual morbid changes. Not that physical changes do not presumably exist in the intimate elements of structure to which our senses have not yet gained access : we believe confidently that as by means of the spectroscope we have discovered facts whicb, before its invention, were quite beyond our ken; or as by means of the telescope we have discovered stars which, without its help, would have remained unknown to us; so the time will come when by the invention of improved instruments of research the insensible movements of molecules will be as open to observation as are the molar movements of the heavens, and when those that come after us will not fail to discover the physical causes of derangements which we are now constrained to call functional. It is with so-called functional diseases, such as epilepsy, chorea, neuralgia, that insanity displays the most marked relationship, not with organic diseases such as apoplexy and softening of the brain, in which we are able to detect visible deterioration of the structure of the nerve centres. The reason of this probably is that while the functional diseases are strictly and essentially nervous, the organic diseases are rather due primarily to disease of other tissues. Apoplexy, for example, is caused by degeneration of the walls of the blood-vessels, and con- sequent rupture of them, is, as it were, an inundation