Henry Maudsley

Body and Mind Henry Maudsley Enl Rev edition

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. Gentlemen : In my last lecture I gave a general survey of the physiology of our mental functions, showing how in- dissolubly they are bound tip with the bodily functions, and how barren must of necessity be a study of mind apart from body. I pointed out that the higher mental operations were functions of the supreme nerve-centres; but that, though of a higher and more complex nature than the functions of the lower nerve-centres, they obeyed the same physiological laws of evolution, and could be best approached through a knowledge of them. I now propose to show that the phenomena of the derangement of mind bear out fully this view of its nature ; that we have not to deal with disease of a metaphysical entity, which the method of inductive inquiry cannot reach, nor the resources of the medical art touch, but with disease of the nervous system, disclosing itself by physical and mental symptoms. I say advisedly physical and mental, because in most, if not all, cases of insanity, at one period or other of their course, there are, in addition to the prominent mental features, symptoms of disordered nutrition and secretion, of disordered sensibility, or of disordered motility. Neither in health nor in disease is the mind imprisoned in one corner of the body; and, when a person is lunatic, ho is, as Dr. Bucknill has remarked, lunatic to his iingers' ends. Mental disorders are neither more nor less than nervous diseases in which mental symptoms predominate, and their entire separation from other nervous diseases has been a sad hinderance to progress. "When a blow on the head has paralyzed sensibility and movement, in consequence of the disease in the brain which it has initiated, the patient is sent to the hospital; but when a blow on the head has caused mental derangemen...