Modern problems in psychiatry / by Ernesto Lugaro ; translated by David Orr and R.G. Rows.

  • Ernesto Lugaro
Date:
1909
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Modern problems in psychiatry / by Ernesto Lugaro ; translated by David Orr and R.G. Rows. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mental disease? He tries to answer this question so far as thè facts will enable him to do so. The whole chapter is necessarily full of theory, but it is a reai attempt by an acute and honest mind which knows thè most recent anatomical facts, to throw light on thè clinical facts of psychiatry. He tries to counteract our common looseness and vagueness of thought in regard to those facts. It is highly suggestive too, its perusal making thè instructed reader ask many questions. No student of thè subject should omit to read what Lugaro says on those matters, for it seems to me to bring mental facts and brain organisation closer together and makes them more comprehensible than any existing book on Psychiatry. In his chapter on Pathogenesis he treats lucidly of thè pathogenetic importance of abnormal stimuli from organs other than thè brain in causing psychoses. His exposition as to how stimuli, coarse and fine, direct and indirect, may be diffused, selected, inhibited, and trans- formed in and by thè neurones in thè cerebral cortex, has much practical importance. He dwells on thè selective action of certain toxins and thè localised psychic results thus caused. He contrasts thè stimuli which cause mental depression with those which produce exaltation. He believes hallucinations are not primary, resulting from direct stimulation of thè sensory centres or thè perceptive centres, but result always from excitation of thè “ representative centres and associations ” in thè cortex by means of thè connecting fibres between thè various sets of centres. He points out that systematised and fixed delusions always centre round an instinct or a fundamental passion of human nature, e.g., delusions of persecution round thè passion for possession, delu- sions of grandeur round thè sense of our personality and value, etc. As to “fixed idea9 ” he considers thè affec- tive, and not thè volitional theory, thè most reasonable. He maintains that such theorizing is necessary if
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