Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    paralysis, we cannot fairly be asked to recognize the adequate cause of the disease and the intellectual disorder as disease, and at the same time to deny the character of disease to the intermediate symptoms. Not only may moral derangement thus go be- fore intellectual derangement for some time and itself constitute the disease, but it constantly ac- companies the latter; so much so that Esquirol declared moral alienation, not delusion, to be the proper characteristic of mental derangement. There are, he says, madmen in whom it is dif- ficult to find any trace of hallucination, but there are none in whom the passions and moral affections are not disordered, perverted, or destroyed. I have in this particular met with no exceptions. So true is this that disappearance of hallucination or delu- sion only becomes a trustworthy sign of convales- cence after an attack of mental derangement when the person begins to return at the same time to his natural way of feeling. It is hardly to be expected that medical science will, in order not to vex the sotds of judges, dissociate the moral from the intel- lectual phenomena in a downright case of madness, and regard the former, because they look like vice, as vice, the latter only as disease, or deem it right to excuse the man for his insane thinking but to punish him for his insane' feeling and acts, so far at any rate as these acts are not the direct unqualified offspring of his insane thought. Again, moral insanity may occur in a person who has at one time laboured under another form