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

  • George Fielding Blandford
Date:
1877
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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.

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    is simple, compared with the complex human system. Whether we consider the emotional or the intellectual traits of the primitive man, we find that the prevailing character- istic of both is a childlike simplicity. Emotionally the savage is impulsive and improvident, intellectually he is deficient in reflectiveness, in the power of generalizing, and capacity for abstract ideas, herein resembling the child of the civilized. As we find insanity occurring but rarely in the children of our own country, so must it occur but rarely in savage races, more rarely indeed, for there we shall not meet with the transmitted taint to which is due almost all the insanity of early life that meets us at home.* To say that our specialized and complex brain is more apt to be disordered than that of lower men, is no more than saying that a compound piece of mechanism is more likely to get out of order than a simple one. Nevertheless, it is also true that much of the insanity of civilisation might be prevented. It grows out of the evils and vices of civilisa- tion, just as fevers and such like disorders are engendered by the crowding of populations. Although it must always be that the hard-working brain of civilized man is more prone to disorder than that of the childlike savage of the wilderness, yet it is to be hoped that the preventible sources of insanity may be by degrees diminished, just as sanitary knowledge and laws will reduce the mortality from fevers, scarlatina, smallpox, and the like. If we compare civilized with uncivilized countries by means of the statistics of insanity, we shall labour in vain. We have enough to do rightly to examine the statistics of our own country. There are not half-a-dozen other coun- tries in the world, civilized or uncivilized, whose statistics are comparable with our own. In the year 1844, there were in the asylums of England and Wales 11,272 lunatics, and in workhouses and private dwellings 9339. In 1858, there * Vide Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology, chaps, vi. vii.
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