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.

    81/356 (page 45)
    of the adjacent territory through the giving way of the banks of the stream, the destruction of nerve-structure being secondary to the effusion of blood. Softening of the brain again is probably owing to defective nutrition as much as to any inherent weakness of nerve element. Certain it is that those morbid changes, whatever they are, in the intimate elements of the nervous system, which are the conditions of mental derangement, are much more closely allied to the similarly obscure morbid conditions of epilepsy, neuralgia, and chorea, than they are to the visible and palpable injury of structure which we meet with in the so-called organic diseases. It is hardly necessary to point out that those who inherit a tendency or predisposition to insanity are, other things being equal, less favourably placed in the struggle of life than those who are free from such tendency; their nervous centres are less stable, and more likely therefore to fall into derangement of function; and when the equili- brium of them has been disturbed, they do not, like perfectly soundly constituted centres, return easily after a short time to their old equilibrium, but are apt to find a more stable equilibrium in degenerate function; just as in the breaking up of highly complex organic compounds the components fall readily into more simple and stable combinations, until the human body, as it goes through the successive stages of putrefaction, is reduced at last to carbonic acid, water and ammonia. Not all the maxims of all the philosophies nor all the lessons of all the religions which the world has seen, will annihilate