The moral treatment of disease / [James Foulis Duncan].

  • James Foulis Duncan
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral treatment of disease / [James Foulis Duncan]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    public that degree of attention to which it is entitled, both from the importance of its nature and its interesting cha- racter. The subject to which I allude is the Moral Treat- ment of Disease, or the consideration of the influence ex- erted upon patients by the character of the physician, his reputation in any particular department of the healing art, his manner in his ordinary intercourse with the sick, and all those other circumstances that strike a patient’s atten- tion, and bear upon his condition. In this point of view it is contrasted with the more obvious remedies in common use, and which may be called the Medical Treatment. The term Moral Treatment, as most persons are aware, is now in common use in reference to the management of cases of Insanity, and its authorised admission into that part of Practical Medicine justifies me in adopting it in other branches of the science in a similar sense. The introduction of this term was evidently due to a theory formerly entertained with regard to the nature of Insanity, namely, that it was a disorder of the intellectual principle itself, as distinguished from disease of the brain, the material instrument of thought, and which naturally led to the conclusion that for the relief of such maladies moral remedies were more appropriate than material. Whether the theory be correct or not, certain it is that the conclusion to which it led, and the practice it intro- duced, have been found, after extended observation, to be productive of the happiest consequences to the class of patients it was designed to relieve ; and the present con- dition of the Insane, as contrasted with what it formerly was, ranks among the greatest improvements of modern medicine. In the production of the result, the use of the term, Moral Treatment, trifling as such a circumstance may seem, played a most important part. It attracted atten-