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.

    65/378 (page 41)
    LECT. II.] MENTAL DISORDERS. mental features, symptoms of disordered nutrition and secretion, of disordered sensibility, or of disordered motility. Neither in health nor in disease is the mmd imprisoned in one corner of the body; and when a person is lunatic, he is, as Dr. Bucknill has remarked, lunatic to his fingers' ends. Mental disorders are neither more nor less than nervous diseases in which mental symptoms predominate, and their entire separation from other nervous diseases has been a sad hindrance to progress. When a blow on the head has paralysed sensibility and movement, in consequence of the disease in the brain which it has initiated, the patient is sent to the hospital; but when a blow on the head has caused mental derangement, in consequence of the disease of brain which it has ini- tiated, the patient is sent to an asylum. In like manner, one man who has unluckily swallowed the eggs of a taenia, and has got a cysticercus in the brain, may go to the hospital; another who has been similarly unlucky goes to an asylum. Syphilitic disease of the brain or its arteries lands one person in an asylum with mental symptoms predominant, another in an hospital with sensory and motor disorder predominant. The same cause produces different symptoms, according to the part of the brain which it particularly affects. No doubt it is right that mental derangements should have, as they often require, the special appliances of an asylum, but it is certainly not right that the separation which is necessary for treatment should reach to their pathology and to the method of its study. So long as this is the case, we shall