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.
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![I.] SUPREME NERVE-CENTRES. i? relate now; they prove how large a part sensori-motor functions, which are the highest nerve functions of so many animals, play in our daily actions. We ought clearly to apprehend the fact that, as with the spinal cord, so here, the movements which take place in answer to the stimulus from without may be excited by the stimulus of the will descending from the hemispheres, and that, when they are so excited, the immediate agency of them is the same. The movements that are out- wardly manifest are, as it were, contained inwardly in the appropriate motor nuclei; these have been educated to perform them. Hence it is that, when the left corpus striatum is broken up by disease, the right cannot do its special work; if it could, a man might write with his left hand when his right hand was dis- abled by paralysis. Thus much, then, concerning our sensori-motor acts. When we have yielded up to the spinal cord all the part in our actions that properly belongs to it, and to the sensory ganglia and their connected motor nuclei all the part that belongs to them, we have subtracted no incon- siderable part from the phenomena which we are in the habit of designating mental and including under mind. But we still leave untouched the highest functions of the nervous system—those to which the hemispherical ganglia minister. These are the functions of intelligence, of emotion, and of will; they are the strictly mental functions. The question at once arises whether we have to do in these supreme centres with fundamentally dilferent properties and different laws of evolution from c](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21694540_0037.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
