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.

    376/440 page 332
    Control of the Feeble-minded and Insane, to which I have referred, which, after four years of exhaustive inquiry, has in 1908 brought out the eight volumes with the wide-reaching recommendations for the consideration of Parliament and the public that appear in volume viii. Since the time of the Egyptian Priest-Physicians, and especially of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, science has devoted itself, at long intervals, to the question of mental disease and defect. It rightly con- nected the condition with faults in the working of the human brain, although in the Middle Ages the purely spiritual and mental nature of the symptoms were believed in by most of the doctors. Since medicine became imbued with the spirit of modern science, how- ever, no doubts have been entertained that mental deficiency and mental disorder must be referred to the brain as their vehicle and cause. A definite department of medicine, that of Psychiatry, has been created, and has done, and is doing, the work of investigation, of clinical study, of experiment, and of recording results. Workers in this field, in all countries, have been active ; they have called in the aid of anatomy, physiology, psychology, bacteriology, and pathology. Progress has been slow but sure. The workers realize that it is the most difficult of all departments of scientific medicine, because the connection of mind and body is by far the most obscure question science has to elucidate. In one sense psychiatry is necessarily the highest branch of medicine inasmuch as the mind is the highest thing in the world, and its vehicle in the human brain is the last product of Evolution, and is the most complicated and delicate piece of living machinery in the world both in structure and working. But no one can doubt, who believes in modern science, that it will ultimately triumph over all those difficulties and will secure for humanity a definite knowledge of mental disease and defect, with means for its cure and prevention. Along
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