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.

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    tination to madness. The inherited liability may be strong or weak; it may be so weak as hardly to peril sanity amidst the most adverse circumstances of life, or so strong as to issue in an outbreak of madness amidst the most favourable external cir- cumstances. Now it is certain that if we were in- terested in the breeding of a variety of animals, we should not think of breeding from a stock which was wanting in those qualities that were the highest characteristics of the species : we should not will- ingly select for breeding purposes a hound that was deficient in scent, or a greyhound that was deficient in speed, or a racehorse that could neither stay well nor gallop fast. Is it right then to sanction propa- gation of his kind by an individual who is wanting in that which is the highest attribute of man—a sound and stable mental constitution ? I note this as a question to be seriously faced and sincerely an- swered, although not expecting that mankind, in the present state of their development, will either seriously face it or sincerely answer it. When one considers the reckless way in which persons, whatever the defects of their mental and bodily constitution, often get married, without sense of responsibility for the miseries which they entail upon those who will be the heirs of their infirmities, without regard, in fact, to anything but their own present gratification, one is driven to think either that man is not the pre-eminently reasoning and moral animal which he claims to be, or that there is in him an instinct which is deeper than knowledge.