Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    314/364 (page 296)
    tal organisation, and it is borne in upon us that ad- vice, if it was to do any good, should have guided the direction of education. The physician soon learns how little effect the best counsels have upon those who, having a tendency to insanity, come to him to ask what they shall do to be saved from the threatened danger: they listen attentively, assent perhaps gratefully, go their ways, and do—exactly as they did before. But if we were seriously minded to check the increase or lessen the production of insanity, it would be necessary to begin even farther back, and to lay down rules to prevent the propagation of a disease which is one of the most hereditary of dis- eases. Although it cannot, like small-pox or fever, be communicated from individual to individual, and so be spread through a community, the lunatic being happily in a minority of one in the world, and not commonly infecting other persons with his morbid belief, yet unhappily it is a disease which, having ex- isted in the parent, may entail upon the child a pre- disposition more or less strong to a like disease. If there is one conviction which a widening experience brings home to the practical physician, it is a con- viction of the large part which hereditary predispo- sition in some form or other plays in the causation of insanity: it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that few persons go mad, save from palpable physical causes, who do not show more or less plainly by their gait, manner,' gestures, habits of thought, feeling and action, that they have a sort of predes-