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.

    99/356 (page 63)
    friends do not fail to feel, although they cannot always describe it. Now, these signs of moral perversion are really the first symptoms of a mental derangement which may, in its further course, go through all degrees of intellectual disorder, and end in destruction of mind, with visible de- struction of the nerve-cells which minister to mind. Is the end, then, dependent on organization, or rather disorgani- zation, and is the beginning not? This course of degeneracy is but a summary in the individual of what may be traced through generations ; and in both cases we are constrained to believe that the moral changes are as closely dependent upon physical causes as are the intellectual changes which accompany or follow them. If it be not so, we may bid farewell to all investigation of mental function by a scientific method. Note, again, the effect which a severe attack of insanity sometimes produces upon the moral nature of the indi- vidual. The person entirely recovers his reason; his intellectual faculties are as acute as ever, but his moral character is changed; he is no longer the moral man that he was; the shock has destroyed the finest part of his mental organization. Henceforth his life may be as dif- ferent from his former life as, in an opposite direction was the life of Saul of Tarsus from the life of Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. An attack of epilepsy has pro- duced the same effect, effacing the moral sense as it effaces the memory sometimes; and one of the most striking phenomena observed in asylums is the extreme change in moral character in the epileptic which precedes and heralds the approach of his fits. A fever or an injury