Thoughts on the causation of insanity / by John P. Gray.

  • Gray, John P. (John Purdue), 1825-1886.
Date:
[1872?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thoughts on the causation of insanity / by John P. Gray. 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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    term which he uses instead of the old expression hered- itary predisposition,) I fully believe, what he is tempted sometimes to think, that insanity occurs only as the result of physical causation—that a nec- essary antecedent to madness is a disordered physical state of the brain—that it never occurs in a person of sound brain. In 1868, two years before the publi- cation of Maudsley's work, from which I quote, in an annual address before the State Medical Society, I said: Insanity is now generally recognized as a bodily disease, a disorder of the brain, and must take its place in the category of the neuroses, and is in fact the highest expression of this class. My predecessor, Dr. Brigham, while declaring that it was his opinion that moral causes predominated in the development of insanity, nevertheless qualified this declaration in the following words: The phrase ' de- rangement of mind ' conveys an erroneous idea, for such derangement is only a symptom of disease in the head, and is not the primary affection. It is true that moral and mental causes may produce insanity, but they pro- duce it by first occasioning either functional or organic disease of the brain. On examining the heads of those who die insane, some disease of the brain or its append- ages is generally found. He argues that the brain, considered as a whole, is the instrument by which the mind operates, and after referring to the belief in the dependence of the mind upon a sound state of the body as forced upon us by almost daily occurrences; and giving some illustrations, he adds: Insanity fur- nishes farther evidence that the brain is the organ by which the mind acts, for this is not a disease of the im- material mind itself, but of the brain, and often result- ing from some injury. Such a diseased state of the organ of the mind, of the very instrument of thought,