Clinical lectures on mental diseases.

  • Thomas Clouston
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures on mental diseases. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    marriage. If such, a woman marries, slie runs innumerable risks in pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation; and she may have weakly children; if she remains single, she runs nearly as many in unused functions, hysteria, unsatisfied cravings, objectless emotion, and want of natural interests in life. For herself she would get more happiness in life by marrying; for the world it is better that she should not. But prophylaxis in mode of living, attention to keep the body nutrition at all times up to the highest mark, and early treatment of the beginnings of the evil would, I am sure, greatly ward off the risks of another attack. I need hardly say that the cause assigned—viz., the sermon she heard—had in reality less to do with the disease than the brain she took to church, predis- posed by heredity, exhausted by study, and the unnatural life at a boarding-school, starved of fresh air, and rendered unstable by the physiological crisis of commencing menstruation. And here I would say, once for all, about unusual religious services, exciting preaching, and revival meetings, that, as a physician, I have no objection to them at all, rather the contrary, but I think they are only suited to stolid healthy brains, and should on no account be attended by persons with weak heads, excitable dispositions, and neurotic constitutions. The immense variety that the combination of different mental or nervous symptoms is capable of producing, comes out in this the simplest of all mental ailments. In some cases the mental pain is, as it were, negative rather than positive, in others there is a simple blunting of the emotions with a tinge of depression; in others, again, the normal gaiety disappears, in others there is a paralysis of energy, in others a sudden ceasing to care anything about the usual interests of life, in others a natural suspiciousness of temperament becomes morbid and causes mental pain, in others a natural diffidence of disposition increases so as to become a disease and to cause intense unhappi- ness, and in others it is a mere tedium vitce. It would swell the bulk of this lecture to utterly impossible proportions were I to give cases illustrative of all these conditions, but, to
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