Thirty-fourth annual report of the directors of the Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics : submitted, in terms of their charter, to a general meeting of the directors, 19th June, 1854 with the report of the medical officers.

  • Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thirty-fourth annual report of the directors of the Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics : submitted, in terms of their charter, to a general meeting of the directors, 19th June, 1854 with the report of the medical officers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    conviction forces itself upon us that the explanation appertains to that higher knowledge which God has placed beyond the apprehen¬ sion of his creatures. The metaphysician analyzes thought with ingenious scrutiny, the physiologist examines and compares the complexities of the nervous system, and the pathologist collates the morbid products after the spirit has taken its flight; and still there remains a treasure of knowledge vast and deep, and threatening to defy all artifice to bring it to the light of day. To great thinkers, such as Descartes and Malebranche, the intercourse of mind with matter has appeared so mysterious and wonderful, that they could conceive its possi¬ bility only by affirming a special interposition of divine agency in every act of perception; and although we now know the instru¬ mentality of the nervous system as an immediate agent in the operation, all the steps of the process—the original difficulties— are as inscrutable as when men first thought upon the subject. It is as impossible to describe the process by which an individual thinks morbidly as it is to give an explanation of healthy intelli¬ gence. The perceptions of real life, and the delusions of ideal life —the healthy emotions engendered by the one, and the morbid tumult of passion excited by the other—are all alike problems without solutions. Our accumulated records of dissections of those who have died during the persistence of all forms of the disease, indicate nothing in regard to this interesting question. Nor is this result to be wondered at, seeing that the search was made, after death, for the precise relations in which the fallen intellect stood to the nervous system during life. The scalpel reveals various lesions of various parts of the organism, and still the question constantly recurs, What was the condition of the spiritual being which has fled from it s frail tenement ? How shall we conceive the overthrow of a spiritual constitution under the influence of these evidences of inflammation, or effusion, or other organic lesion ? No class of diseases presents such insuperable difficulties. The organic lesions in the heart’s structure explain at once, and with the utmost precision, the impediments which the blood has encountered during its circulation through it. The morbid appearances presented by the lungs afford the rationale of B
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