New facts and remarks concerning idiocy : being a lecture delivered before the New York Medical Journal Association, October 15, 1869 / by Edward Seguin.

  • Edward Constant Seguin
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: New facts and remarks concerning idiocy : being a lecture delivered before the New York Medical Journal Association, October 15, 1869 / by Edward Seguin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Brandeis University Libraries, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University.

    44/56 page 40
    be strictly drawn from physiological experiments. To attempt to give here an exposition of these principles—which are already established elsewhere, and are yet susceptible of increase in number, perfection, and extension—would be like a trial of in- serting a full didactic treatise in a discourse. However, a com- prehensive exposition of the mental process by which one of these principles of physiological education was arrived at, does not seem a work of supererogation here, to give you, Mr. Pres- ident and gentlemen, the key to the way of discovering new ones. (d) Educating the mind through perceptions instead of by pre- arranged reasonings. When we speak to the reason of a child with our reason, he understands us, more or less correctly or not, always in his own manner, that we can hardly probe on the spot, and whose thoroughness will be shown in his after- life, but still his mind and ours have communicated through ideas. How different it is with an idiot! Our mind addresses itself in vain to his mind, an immured recess, never lighted be- fore. This explains why it was impossible to educate idiots as long as education was simply a process of transfusion of ideas from one mind to another. When that impossibility was demonstrated, we had to look for other means of educating the idiot. These means, we knew, we could not obtain from psy- chology, which had already proved its impotence ; we looked for them in the resources offered by physiology ; we will pres- ently see with what results. (e) Considering all the manifestations of life as expressions of functions, and all functions as resultant from a certain organism, we set aside the scholastic distinction of mind and matter, in- tellectual faculties and physical functions. Confident that to call them one name or another does not alter their nature, and could not modify the results of our experiments upon them, we assumed simply that— (/) If we could take hold of an organ, we would be able to make it produce its function From this starting-point we gradu- ated our means of educating the functions of idiots upon the facility of our approach to their organs, and we found that— (g) The organs of sensation being within our reach, and those
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3