Hand book of the mental hygiene movement and exhibit.

  • National Committee for Mental Hygiene.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hand book of the mental hygiene movement and exhibit. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    20/108 (page 10)
    What is the significance of these statistics, and what are some of the lessons to be drawn from them? It is of great importance to each one of us, to the Nation, and to Humanity that these questions be answered correctly. These figures give us some idea of what an appalling number of people there are unable to adjust themselves to meet the conditions of life owing to a bad heredity, or to an unfavor- able environment created by unnatural social conditions, or to a faulty education. In order to understand the relations of human beings to their environment we must first have some idea of the methods suc- cessfully employed in the study of all living beings. Life a Process of Adjustment Plants like animals are alive, but the life processes in plants are relatively simple. Living beings possess certain activities. Thus the living plant or animal takes in food and converts part of it into energy. That is one form of activity seen in the conversion of potential energy into visible movement. A plant turns its leaves toward the light and in other ways is capable of adjusting itself to its surroundings. Some of the lower forms of animal life have simple activities resembling those of plants, but neither plants nor the lowest animal forms have that special mechanism of adjustment, the nervous system, which char- acterizes the higher forms of animal life. The Mechanism of Adjustment The mechanism of more complex adjustment is the nervous system, and the general plan of its structure, similar for all animals which possess one, is indicated in Charts III, IV, V and VI. The more complex the mechanism of adjustment becomes, the more varied are the potential activities of the animal. The area of the body in which the more complicated adjustments take place is the cortex or outside layer of the brain. Chart VI.) This part of the adult brain contains about 9,000,000,000 more nerve cells than does the same area of the brain of an anthropoid ape. This extraordinary complex arrangement makes it possible for a man successfully to adjust his activities to meet countless situations for which the brain-mechanism of the higher apes is entirely inadequate.