Insanity : its classification, diagnosis, and treatment / by E.C. Spitzka.

  • Spitzka, E. C. (Edward Charles), 1852-1914.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity : its classification, diagnosis, and treatment / by E.C. Spitzka. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    up of down to measure his neighbor he unhesitatingly ad- mits that he has to look up. But on being confronted with his inconsistency, how it is possible that a man over five thousand feet higher than the tallest giant can possibly look up to an ordinary-sized mortal, he simply reiterates that he is so many thousand feet higher than the interlocu- tor or any other man. A third person claims that he is General Grant, the week before he claimed to be Roths- child the banker, but abandoned that idea when told that the latter was dead. He is unable to say when the war began, what his business was before he became a general, what battles he fought in, and finally what land he is presi- dent of. A systematic delusional Ulysses Grant would, in marked contrast with the paretic, be a walking history of the war and of Ulysses Grant; he would very probably content himself too, with the more plausible delusion that he was a brother or intimate friend, or a subaltern of the general, to whom the latter owed his inspiration and suc- cess. While, on the whole, the organization of a delusion reflects the essential type of the insanity of which it is a manifesta- tion, it must be admitted that there are special delusions or groups of delusions, in which the formal contents and the superficial guise of these conceptions have a diagnostic value which is lacking with others. The delusions of marital infi- delity and sexual mutilation, when combined, suggest the existence of alcoholic insanity. The combination of unsys- tematized sexual with religious delusions of a hallucinatory tinge is characteristic of certain forms of epileptic insanity. The current notion, expressed in several treatises, that delusions are independent of sensorial impressions, is erro- neous. Aside from the fact that systematized as well as unsystematized delusions are sometimes accompanied, and are often determined and modified, by hallucinations,* it is a common observation that visceral illusions, if they do not cause, modify the character of delusions. Thus, a patient, in the writer's observation, who believed that he had a doc- tor in his belly, was found to have extensive peritoneal ad- hesions; another, whose case has been cited from Esquirol in most elementary treatises, had the notion that he had a * A case was recently discussed and recognized to have been correctly observed in the Medico-Psychological Society of Berlin, where a systema- tized delusion had developed in consequence of a dream, no pre-existing mental taint being discoverable.