States of unconsciousness : irresistible impulses, epilepsy, treadaway.

Date:
[1878]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: States of unconsciousness : irresistible impulses, epilepsy, treadaway. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    Reprinted from * The Journal of Psychological Medicine,’ Vol. III., Part 2, STATES OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS. A monograph of the states of unconsciousness has yet to be mitten. For years to come this may remain a desideratum, “ a sight to dream of, not to seebut until the birth, bearings, and boundaries of that condition, which entails a loss or a lack of the knowledge of our own thoughts and feelings, be exhaus- tively dealt with, the relations of the human mind and of human acts to responsibility must be imperfect and uncertain. Habit and popular experience have reconciled us to very vague notions on this subject. The total suspension of mentalisation in coma and syncope has been recognised. The partial interference with sensibility and mobility, and the consequent limitation of will in trance, trance-coma, somnambulism, is known rather as a physiological curiosity than as an affection which places the individual in a different mental and legal position. But it is only necessary to advert to exaggerated, or even to ordinary examples of abstraction, vacancy, fugacious inattention, or absence of mind, to the profound concentration in study, sorrow, suffering, to demonstrate that there is a large unmeasured scale of gradation and of unconsciousness, and that it is only in the highly cultivated, exercised mind, and where there is an equable balance between the subjective and objective faculties, that periods never recur of impaired consciousness, of those gaps in the continuity of perception and memory in which the con- nection of the individual with the thing said, done, or recalled, is no longer distinct or trustworthy. Even in master minds, such as that of Sir Kobert Peel, such obliviousness may occur. He is described as sitting plunged in profound, probably in painful reverie in the House of Commons, after the sitting was A IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSES—EPILEPSY—TREADAWAY.