Insanity and its treatment : lectures on the treatment, medical and legal, of insane patients / by G. Fielding Blandford.
- George Fielding Blandford
- Date:
- 1892
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.
44/524 page 32
![THE PHENOMENA OP MINU. drink, become degenerate and fallen. Like the savage child, this one will be incapable of attaining the perfection of in- tellectual and emotional life. Either he is so stunted and blighted that he is an imbecile and an idiot from the begin- ning, or when he enters upon life he is unequal to contend with the chances of fortune, or his organization is so unstable that every ordinary illness disturbs his reason. And even if he does not fall into a sudden and marked state of insanity, he nevertheless is imlike other people. His notions are warped and eccentric; he is destitute of the sense of duty and of right possessed by others of his country and social status. He becomes a criminal, if not a lunatic, and hands on to his descendants, if he has any, the inheritance of criminality or insanity, swelling the ranks of the criminal or the lunatic class. Each of these is a degenerate and de- graded section of the community, which might be reclaimed through several generations, if we could select the healthiest specimens, and leave the worst to die out, as in fact they often do, in a state of sterility. In ordinary health, excitations of our nerve centres pro- duce certain feelings, which, though often very complex, may yet be all resolved into pleasure or pain. The result of the excitation, if it be j)owerful, is action of some kind—verba], facial, or bodily ; or desire for action, which we may repress. In the child or the savage this repression is not exercised, and there is an immediate display of muscular action demon- strating the feeling experienced. More civilized men, from other ideas habitual to them, repress these signs if they are able. But this they cannot always do, and the pent-up storm of rage or grief finds vent in words or action. To a centre in its ordinary state any stimulation may be at once pleasant or painful; or it may be at first pleasant, and may afterwards be so prolonged as to cause pain. Familiar instances of the latter occur to every one. The exercise in which we at first take keen delight becomes](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20403161_0046.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
