Insanity and its treatment : lectures on the treatment, medical and legal, of insane patients / by G. Fielding Blandford.

  • George Fielding Blandford
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity and its treatment : lectures on the treatment, medical and legal, of insane patients / by G. Fielding Blandford. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    73/534 (page 57)
    the whole kingdom, out of every 100 deaths, over five years of age, 17 are ascribed to phthisis. The experience of Dr Boyd, at the Somerset Asylum, is equally unfavourable to Dr Ciouston’s view. The varieties of insanity hitherto discussed are marked by symptoms of depression rather than noisy, angry, or gay excitement. They belong to the asthenic rather than the sthenic order of cases. I now pass on to the consideration of another group of patients, some of whom present the one set of symptoms, some the other. Their insanity would be comprised, according to Dr Skae, under the heads of climac- teric insanity, the insanity of pregnancy, lactation, and child-bearing, and the insanity of pubescence; and in this order I will consider them, because the first three varieties are characterized in the majority of instances by depression, the last two by the opposite. And all specially illustrate what I have said about insanity being the outcome of many causes rather than one. In almost all such patients you will find a strong inherited tendency, which lights up the disease when some perhaps trivial circumstance causes mental worry, or when such events as parturition or pregnancy occur. At the time when women undergo what is called the change of life, and at an analogous period, from the age of climacteric fifty to sixty years in men, insanity of a melan- insanity, cholic type is common. It may have been preceded by worry or ill health, or may make its appearance without apparent cause. It is noticeable, however, that there is no immediate connexion between the cessation of the cata- menia and this disorder. Frequently it does not make its appearance till some time after menstruation has ceased, and it is as common in men as in women. It may be the result of weakness caused by the menorrhagia which so often accompanies the cessation of the menses; it may be due to weakness caused in other ways ; but it is not to be looked