Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    who ill-use them, it is still true that the public look upon the disease as a calamity of quite special kind, conceal it as a disgrace, and sometimes treat it as a crime. By the feeling evinced, so unlike that which any other disease elicits, one is reminded of the way in which the lower animals and some savages act when one of their number falls sick: they slacken not their speed to allow the sufferer to continue with them, but leave it by the way- side to perish alone ; so far from helpful sympathy, they evince actual antipathy and drive it from among them : it is the saddest sight, indeed, to see the way in which animals thus persecute sometimes the sick and helpless member of the herd. Happily it results from the moral development of civilized man that he does not so act towards one who has fallen sick of au ordinary bodily disease; on the contrary, the affliction elicits his warm sympathy and active help. But it is not in the same measure so when the sickness is a sickness of mind. There is a dim but deep instinct that this is not a disease which is quite like other diseases, that a man by it from himself is ta'en away, alienated from himself and from his kind, and that he is something of a reproach to the nature of humanity ; the result being a vague feeling of antipathy like that which the lower animals display to- wards one of their kind that has fallen ill. At bottom this might seem to be curious evidence of the operation of the law of natui-al selection, whereby a diseased member that is unfitted for the natural functions of its land is instinctively extruded from companionship. Just