Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders / by Henry Maudsley. 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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    ••] quality as its cause varies, strengthened by education and exercise, enfeebled by disuse, decaying with decay of structure, and always needing for its outward expression the educated agency of the subordinate motor centres. We have to deal with will, not as a single undecomposable faculty unaffected by bodily conditions, but as a result of organic changes in the supreme centres, affected as cer- tainly -and seriously by disorder of them as our motor facub.ies are by disorder of their centres. Loss of power of will is one of the earliest and most characteristic symptoms of mental derangement; and, whatever may have been thought in times past, we know well now that the loss is not the work of some unclean spirit that has laid its hands upon the will, but the direct effect of physical disease. But I must pass on now to other matters, without stop nine to unfold at length the resemblances between the properties of the supreme centres and those of the lower nerve-centres. We see that the supreme centres are educated, as the other centres are, and the better they are educated the better do they perform their functions of thinking and willing. The development of mind is a gradual process of organization in them. Ideas, as they are successively acquired through the gateways of the senses, are blended and combined and grouped in a complexity that defies analysis, the organic combinations being the physiological conditions of our highest r.iental operations—reflection, reasoning, and judgment. Two leading ideas we ought to grasp and hold fast: first, that the complex and more recondite phenomena of mind are