Unsoundness of mind / by T.S. Clouston.

  • Thomas Clouston
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Unsoundness of mind / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    168/440 page 130
    Those patients who suffered from a general enfeeblement of mind, an impairment of every mental process, he put under Dementia, The patients in whom the brain had not developed from birth he put under Amentia, Imhecility, or Idiocy. Almost every author since Esquirol’s time has devised some new classification of his own, or made some changes in, or additions to, that of the French physician. The discovery in 1820 of what is the most distinct of all the forms of unsoundness of mind, general paralysis, by Bayle, a French physician, gave a new stimulus to the study of unsoundness of mind. Haslam, an English physician, had previously described the essential features of the disease, but he had not segregated it from mental unsoundness in general or given it a name. Bayle pointed out that this disease had special mental symp- toms which ran a definite course that could be predicted in all cases, that it consisted not only of mental symptoms but of a form of paralysis and disorders of sensibility. He pointed out that its termination in death could be accurately relied on, and that after death the brain was always found to be markedly diseased in a certain way. This great generalization was not only an important matter in itself, but it turned the minds of all the students of the subject to study the brain and the body together in every case of mental unsoundness, having this as one result, that such bodily symptoms are found in most cases if they are properly looked for. Few things in science have been found until they are looked for. One of the classifications that attracted many followers was that originally denied by Skae of Morningside, and subsequently extended by myself. It is commonly called the Clinical Classification. ^ In that an endeavour is made to take the whole causes and natural history of the disease into consideration. It especially takes account of * Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 6th ed., p. 12, by the Author.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image