Insanity tested by science, and shown to be a disease rarely connected with permanent organic lesion of the brain. And on that account far more susceptible of cure than has hitherto been supposed / [Charles Mountford Burnett].

  • Burnett, C. M. (Charles Mountford), 1807-1866
Date:
1848
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity tested by science, and shown to be a disease rarely connected with permanent organic lesion of the brain. And on that account far more susceptible of cure than has hitherto been supposed / [Charles Mountford Burnett]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    idea, much as it has been neglected of late years, is really not so far removed from probability as were the doctrines first propounded by Hoffman and Cullen, that diseases generally depended more upon a morbid condition of the solids than the fluids. He, however, referred this individual disease to the excitement of a subtile moveable fluid, included in every part of the medullary substance of brain and nerves.* Sir A. Crichton endeavours to prove that the cause of insanity is a morbid action of the vessels, by which not only the quantity but also the quality of this subtile nervous fluid is influenced.+ Cullen adopted the opinion of Hoffman.t There is good ground for believing that the impressions formed of the incurable nature of insanity were strengthened by this doctrine, and that it has long continued to paralyse the exertions of the pathologist, and to distract the mind from the contem- plation of the true seat of the affection. We shall then at once proceed to show that both reason and science favour the idea that insanity is not and ought not in the first instance, and often to the very last, to be regarded as a disease of the brain, but as a disease floating in the blood, having no fixed or local character, but producing the morbid phenomena which are comprehended under the title of insanity ; it arises from a derangement or mal-assimilation of those particular materials of the blood—carbon and phos- phorus—which constitute the bulk of the elementary tissue of the brain and nervous system generally. When, therefore, we say we believe the disease to be in the blood, we consider it to exist there in the form of either deteriorated or wrongly constructed chemical components. In this sense it must be the sea/, although * Practice of Physic. ft On Mental Derangement. { Medicina Rationalis Systemat., tom. iii, c. 4. Cullen’s doc- trine unfavor- able to the cure of in- sanity. It is seated in the blood.