Insanity : its classification, diagnosis, and treatment; a manual for students and practitioners of medicine / by E. C. Spitzka.

  • Spitzka, E. C. (Edward Charles), 1852-1914.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity : its classification, diagnosis, and treatment; a manual for students and practitioners of medicine / by E. C. Spitzka. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    timents may be unaffected while the emotional ones are disordered, and vice versa. While there is a bond of con- nection between them, it is in the alienist's experience not an absolute one. Disorder of the moral sentiments may be congenital, and equivalent to a partial imbecility, as the father of Ameri- can mental science, Rush, first pointed out. The memory and the reasoning powers may be so slightly affected in this condition that their deficiency is practically unno- ticeable; or the reasoning processes—and this is more fre- quent—may be as perverse as the moral state. Moral perversion may be also acquired. It is a common accom- paniment of advanced epileptic, and it is constant in mas- turbatory insanity. In paretic dementia and other terminal states it is also observed, but its mechanism is here some- what peculiar, and the moral perversions of the deteriorat- ing forms require a separate consideration. (See Part II.) In traumatic and alcoholic insanity, moral perversion, or a blunting of the moral sentiments, seems to grow out of the corresponding emotional obtuseness. It may be advanced as a cardinal canon of psychiatry that in insanity the moral feelings are usually more or less dulled or perverted.* The deficiency of the moral feelings may, however, be of a different kind; in certain cases it may be a necessary result of intellectual enfeeblement, it may be due to an obtuse emotional condition, or it may be an original deficiency analogous to that lack of musical sense, or color- blindness, which may coexist with a fair faculty of lan- guage and good contour perception, just as that moral imbecility which authors call moral insanity may be found associated with fairly good logical powers in the abstract. An intense egotism is sometimes found to lie at the root of a constitutional inability of the individual to recognize any moral obligation to others. In such cases, abstract moral conceptions may be inculcated by education. But the sub- ject of this condition, while he may be able to guide his conduct by these, regards them as purely utilitarian con- * It would be unnecessary to emphasize that moral perversion even to the extent of criminality is consistent with insanity, had the contrary not been urged by medical witnesses on more than one occasion. It has never been asserted, I believe, that insanity improves the moral sentiments; yet the conviction of insane criminals has been effected by parading their previous records of irregularities and crimes as destroying the claim of insanity.