A practical manual of mental medicine / by E. Régis ; with a preface by M. Benjamin Ball ; authorised translation by H.M. Bannister.
- Date:
- 1895
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A practical manual of mental medicine / by E. Régis ; with a preface by M. Benjamin Ball ; authorised translation by H.M. Bannister. 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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![lect, ail arrested development, but, however imbecik' he may be, he may not be insane, and ma}' use nor- mally the restricted intelligence he possesses; he is not a lunatic. But when this imbecile, under tlu- influence of any cause whatever, is attacked with mania or melancholia, Ave have a new element in his case, his insanity, which is superimposed upon the primitive basis of alienation; the mentally alienated individual has become a lunatic. We may add, to accentuate the distinction, that beyond the symptoms it has in common with men- tal alienation, insanity is nearly always unconscious of itself to such a degree that it may be called a misfortune that ignores itself, and that it has for a ])rincipal symptom, if not an absolute criterion, the loss of free will, that is, of the faculty by which the sane man decides and acts with knowledge of the cause, with full freedom and reflection. For this reason, so far as an insane person is not really dom- inated by his morbid influences, and remains to a certain degree master of himself, conqn).^ su/\ he can l)e considered as not being a lunatic in the full sense of the woi'd, there still remains a last step for him to take, that of the pathological subordination of his effo. We may call mental alienation therefore, the total of the p'lthological condif/'oiis essentiolly charorter- ized by disorders of the intelUg< ure. As to insanity, it has been thus defined by Esquirol: A cerebral affection, ordinarily chronic, without](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21963009_0050.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
