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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    can distinguish neither red nor blue, nor yellow, but see everj'thing as if it were grey, so there are persons to whom the whole many coloured profusion of the testhetic and moral world is, in consequence of a certain organic peculiarity, not recognisable, aiid to whose mental vision everything appears of one unvaried grey. There are yet others who are not deficient in the perceptive or receptive faculties, but in the reactive, the emotions and the will. They are quiet, tranquil beings, in all conditions of life the saddest as well as the most joyful; they remain continually calm, not from any Internal equanimity and harmony, but from frigidity—from a frigidity which to persons in normal conditions appears inconceivable and monstrous. There is here an emotional defect of an altogether interesting kind; as there are refined and Eestlietic geniuses, so there is also a decorous and Eesihetic shallowness, which may go the length of idiocy, and the examples of such deficiencies might be indefinitely extended. But it will be asked, to what doctrine will such views lead ? Are, then, these individuals diseased? Are they insane? Are they, as insanity is disease of the brain, suffering from bram disease ? May not people be in any way different from one another ? Must all be cut according to tlie same pattern ? Will not the alienists, as I have actually heard it said, be taken for mad—they who see nothing anywhere but mental pecuharities, who in the end would desire to put down for monomania every originality and even genius itself? ^ , ^, ^ It is quite right that these questions should be put forth, so that they may receive an immediate answer. All these individuals are not yet either insane or suffering from disease of the brain; in many it remains during life as a mere predisposition, and sometlnng more requires to be added on before predisposition can pass mto disease. But it must be acknowledged to be a very decided anomaly if a person regards the impressions received from the external worid and from his own body differently from the generality of maukmd and if he thus forms a different idea of the surrounding worid ; if the power of comprehending whole provinces of thought and feelmg is denied him, so that he cannot attain to aU the characteristics of- humanity, or if he is possessed of tastes, mstmcts, and passions, quite foreign to the great majority of mankmd, but which m him have an almost unresisted power. We have good ground for the belief that such a deficiency in mental equilibrium depends on an abnormality in the psychical mechanism of the nervous system, tor the increase of these anomalous conditions of the mmd is generally accompanied by symptoms of bodily disease, such as a convulsive seizure or a peripheral irritation of some nerve province. 1 or instance, irritation of the pudendal nerve may introduce and excite these anoraahes, or a peripheral anaesthesia may accompany hem durin- their advance, and may exist and disapi)car along with tliem.