Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    as the lower animals, and the savages who have to wander long distances, abandon or drive away the member that is incapacitated by bodily illness from holding its ground, and whose presence would be an encumbrance; so, in like manner, civilized nations, until recently, thrust out of sight into vile receptacles, where no mention of them more was heard, those members of the community who, through loss of reason, were unable to hold their own in the struggle for existence, and whose presence was felt as an encumbrance, a reproach, and a danger.* One of the saddest chapters in human history is that which describes the cruel manner in which the insane were treated in times past. Notwithstanding that it is happily a thing of the past, it will be instructive to inquire from what causes the barbarous usage sprang: for it was not common to all nations and all times; on the contrary, it had its birth in the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages of Christian Europe. Whatever may have been thought of madness among the peoples who preceded the ancient Greeks—and there is evidence that the Egyptians adopted a singularly enlightened and humane treatment—it is certain that the Greeks had comparatively sound theories of its nature as a disease to be cured by medical and moral means,, and adopted principles of treatment in conformity with those theories. Their dramatic poets, it is true, present terrible pictures of madmen pursued by the anger of the gods ; but these * In the four or five pages which follow, I have repeated in nearly the same words what has been already published in an address on Conscience and Organization, in the second edition of ray work on Body and Mind.