Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders : being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians : with appendix / by Henry Maudsley.
- Maudsley Henry, 1835-1918.
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders : being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians : with appendix / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
23/216 page 3
![I-] of investigation as other natural phenomena ; its disorders were thought to be an incomprehensible affliction and, in accordance with the theological notion, due to the presence of an evil spirit in the sufferer, or to the en- slavement of the soul by sin, or to anything but their trae cause—bodily disease. Consequently, the treatment of the insane was not in the hands of intelligent physicians, who aimed to apply the resources of medicine to the alleviation or cure of bodily illness, but was given up to coarse and ignorant gaolers, whose savage cruelties will for all time to come be a great and ugly blot upon the enlightenment of the age which tolerated them. Matters are happily changed now. On all hands it is admitted that the manifestations of mind take place through the nervous system \ and that its derangements are the result of nervous disease, amenable to the same method of investigation as other nervous diseases. In- sanity has accordingly become a strictly medical study, and its treatment a branch of medical practice. Still, it is all too true that, notwithstanding we know much, and are day by day learning more, of the physiology of the nervous system, we are only on the threshold of the study of it as an instrument subserving mental function. We know little more positively than that it has such function ; we know nothing whatever of the physics and of the chemistry of thought. The conception of mind as a mysterious entity, different essentially from, and vastly superior to, the body which it inhabits and uses as its earthly tenement, but from which its noblest aspirations are thought to be to get free, still works openly or in a B 2](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21694540_0023.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
