Text-book of insanity : based on clinical observations for practitioners and students of medicine.
- Richard von Krafft-Ebing
- Date:
- 1904
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Text-book of insanity : based on clinical observations for practitioners and students of medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
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![Iloinrolli rogardcd the soul as a free force excitable to stinuili, but en- dowed with the power of choice; for him the body was not sonietliing inde- pendent, but, as it were, an organ of the soul. The fundamental law of the soul is freedom; the source of its life, reason. Heinroth's etiologj' is of an ethico-religious nature. All human evils arise from sin; therefore mental disturbances have the same origin. The soul is responsible for its own dis- ease. Passions and sins—that is, the fall from grace—are the causes of mental diseases. The principal elements in their treatment were psychic; that is, a pious life and absolute devotion to God and all that is good. According to Heinroth, the only prophylactic against insanity is Christian faith. Strange to say, this mystic and pious theory of lleinroth found ad- herents, among whom was Bcneke, who, though he did not follow the theory in its fullest sense, still found the essential element of insanity in its psychic aspect, and tiius treated the psychoses from the one-sided psychic standpoint. Another advocate of this theory is Ideler, who, unfortunately with too gi'eat dialectics and acuteness, regarded mental diseases from a purely ethic standpoint, and held them to be nothing but abnormally intensified passions. Just opposition to these errors could not long be wanting. The 2>rincipal opponent in the scientific school who fought these spiritual, ethic, and psycho- logic theories was Nasse, the celebrated clinician of Bonn, who, through his journal for alienists founded in 1818, gave the first impulse of opposition; other opponents were Vering, Friedreich, and Amelung, who at least held fast to the view that the seat of mental disease was the brain. But it was Jacobi who in his zeal to find a somatic basis for insanity so far overshot the mark that he placed the seat of mental disease in organs outside of the skull, and regarded mental disturbances only as a symi)tom which might accompany any disease of the vegetative organs, and thus gave but a very subordinate value to the brain aflfection, which, according to his view, was secondary. In spite of this one-sidedness, he is entitled to the credit of having Bmoothed the way for scientific and clinico-anatomic methods of study whicli brought success; of having directed attention to the very important diseases and disturbances of vegetative organs which accompany and engender insan- ity; and of having pointed the way to such as followed the moral, speculative, and metaphysic methods of observation. During the last few decades great activity has been manifested in the field of psychiatric science, which np to that time had ])oeii so unfruitful and encumbered. Developing humanitarian sentiment has built institutions ever3^vhere favorable for the observation of the insane; and the physicians of these asylums, familiar with all means of diagnosis, and schooled in the empiric method which produced the most brilliant results in the natural sciences, have everywliere been zealous to bring to the service of the new psychiatry results which pathologic anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the nervous system, anthropology, and psychophysics offered. Flemming, Jessen, and Zel- ler were successful workers in the field, which had now become purely medical and somatic. It was the latter who first gave currency to the theory that the various forms of insanity are only stages of one and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21215856_0066.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
