Illustrations of the influence of the mind upon the body in health and disease : designed to elucidate the action of the imagination / by Daniel Hack Tuke.

  • Daniel Hack Tuke
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of the influence of the mind upon the body in health and disease : designed to elucidate the action of the imagination / by Daniel Hack Tuke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    gent professional reader, and afford matter for deep thought. And in his chapter, The Instinctive Actions in relation to Consciousness; the Brain subject to the Laws of Reflex Action, he quotes the passage of Gall already given, and adds, The importance of these doctrines is apparent. They corroborate the truth of the proposition already laid down, that the cranial ganglia [the part of the cerebrum which may be considered as the seat of the passions], although the organ of consciousness, are subject to the same laws as those which govern the other ganglia, the diffused nervous system of animals, and the vital mechanism of vegetables. The reference here, it will be seen, is to the passions and the movements dependent on them (pp. 107, 172). The two points on which Dr. Lay cock insisted, were— first, the extension of Bell's demonstration of the distinction between the motor and sentient nerves, and so placing the sensorial fibres under the power of the Will;1 and secondly, the extension of Marshall Hall's doctrine to the brain; so applying the laws of the excito-motory system to the phenomena, not of the spinal cord only and its prolongation but to the brain also, and the diffused nervous system (p. 86). He did not overlook the importance of involuntary Attention (as well as the Will), which he classed with the conservative acts, or rather with the excito-motor phenomena, and illustrated it by the sensation a nervous female experiences on being pointed at, which probably depends upon changes in the central terminations of the sensitive nerves, excited by the act of Attention. He refers to Dr. Holland's chapter on the Effects of Mental At- tention on Bodily Organs in his Medical Notes and Reflections, 1839, in which he takes a similar view of the subject, though led to it by a different process of inquiry, and points out that Dubois in his work on Hypochondriasis, published in 1837, applied the same principle to the origin of that disease, and that Bonnet (about 1760) maintained the views respecting the agency of Attention on the fibres of the brain which I have already advocated. Referring to Mesmerism, he adds that the phenomena will be useful in more than ever directing inquiry to the action of Will on the sensorial fibres of the brain, and through these on the sensitive nerves, &c. (p. 112-13). 1 MUller held this view also: There is in the central organs a power of vol- untarily directing the mind to all the cerebral and spinal nerves, even to the nerves of common sensation and the nerves of special sense (iii, p. 937).
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