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
Catalogue details

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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    blood from the circulation. He is deceived by the quiet effected in his patient into the idea that the remedy has done good, whereas the chances are greatly contingent, whether this first step has not placed the disease in a relation to the patient at once out of the reach of cure. If the mania was not inflammatory, the abstraction of blood was doing little to remove the mental disease, and much to reduce a body already enervated. But it will be said that the remedies hitherto made use of in the cure of insanity are most numerous, and that it would be untrue to affirm that they are not. It is very certain that the therapeutic method has re- ceived much attention, and multitudes of so-called remedies have been proposed and tried. But if these have been made use of only in obedience to certain preconceived opinions, their number is no proof of the incorrectness of our observation. It is the compara- tively short time these remedies have hitherto been resorted to, nearly all of which are confined to thera- peutic agents ;* the almost general impression on the minds ofall, that after afew months’, or a year’s treat- ment, these cases should be no longer submitted to the action of therapeutic agents, but merely be protected from the danger of doing harm to themselves or others; it is the very trifling value that has been affixed to, and consequently the very little regard that has been paid to, those important hygienic means—air and exercise, food and beverage, which strengthens our belief that there is yet much to be done by persevering efforts towards the recovery of the insane. * Dr. Burrows, in his Commentary, gives twenty-one different kinds of remedial means, as proposed for the treatment or cure of the disease, out of which number nineteen are therapeutic alone. — Jv Therapeutic agents used in relation to wrong patho- logical views of the disease. Little atten- tion paid to other agents.