An introductory lecture read at the opening of the clinique for nervous and mental diseases in the Royal Charité in Berlin, 1st May, 1866 / by Professor W. Griesinger ; translated by John Sibbald.

  • Griesinger, Wilhelm, 1817-1868.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introductory lecture read at the opening of the clinique for nervous and mental diseases in the Royal Charité in Berlin, 1st May, 1866 / by Professor W. Griesinger ; translated by John Sibbald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    ment of parts of the brain which are in no way concerned in the neuralgia, ideas whose character is in no way connected with the pain, but which, throagh the irritation produced by it upon definite portions of the brain, are carried on in a quite separate region of the imagination. There are a large number of nervous diseases in which conditions present themselves where the principal symptoms consist of nume- rous sympathetic sensations, and sympathetic and reflex-movements in nerve-provinces, that are quite apart from the seat of the original irritation. And there is likewise in mental derangements a patho- logical mechanism which may be regarded as an intensified dispersion or extension of the disturbed area; other quite remote provinces act in concert which in healthy brain action would have remained quite unaffected by this first exercise of function. There are numerous sympathetic ideas and reflex desires excited in one instance by other ideas, in another by mere sensations. There are processes which are foreign to the healthy association of ideas. New, peculiar, and to healthy persons quite inexplicable combinations and connections of ideas are formed in quite unusual directions. As, for instance, in many conditions of cerebral excitement, sympathetic actions of the most various sensations and ideas act upon the cerebral area of the sexual ideas and feelings; from it commotions are spread around which are never reached in healthy conditions; ideas which have not the slightest relation to the sexual sphere become then accompanied with sexual feelings, ideas, and excitement, and become mixed with them in the oddest manner. There are a large number of interesting cases generally included under the so-called hypochondria, a name which in practice is received in various senses, but which, at any rate, frequently indicates the first stage of the severest mental diseases, cases, therefore, which depend upon an analogous process. Sensations arising in the inte- rior of the body which in healthy conditions never enter the manu- factory of our thoughts, which are entirely removed from our con- sciousness (although nerves concerned appear to penetrate pretty far into the brain), sensations arising in the domain of the circulation, of the digestion, of intestinal movement, &c., become, as it were, alive, and overstep their usual hmits. They break in and seize directly, partly as motive and partly as material, upon the usual circle of ideas, and thus become a source of new, often of the strangest, and to healthy persons absolutely incomprehensible, ideas and mental pictures. Many patients regard this previously unusual direct inter- vention of the abdominal functions as something of a foreign nature, and they speak sometimes of their body in a peculiar emphatic manner, as of an external power with which they hold mtercourse. Is there here a removal of obstructions to the conduction of sensa- tions—obstructions which, as in the case of the processes in the