Essays on hypochondriasis and other nervous affections by John Reid M.D. 1921 : [Review].

Date:
[1822]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on hypochondriasis and other nervous affections by John Reid M.D. 1921 : [Review]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ther Nervous 1821. Af- 'pHtSW.t 'hondriasis am ohn Reid, M.D. resting volume to a variety of readers; it selectio^'of the most important particulars about nervous diseases which have occurred to the author, stripped of all technical expressions, and written in a style singularly striking and agreeable. There are many persons not belonging to the medical profession who feel a strong interest about what are called 4 the diseases of the mind’; these consist of literary men, especially metaphysicians, reading valetudinarians, who prefer a medical treatise to one of the Scotch novels, and men of all kinds belonging to the Society of Friends. As these are the persons of most influence among the members of our mad-house committees, it is peculiarly important that their opinions on these subjects should be correct. Now it is a favourite notion with them that insanity is a disorder in the mind, independent of any part of the body—that it requires mental reme- dies alone, and that the study and treatment of it is the province not of the physician, but of the moralist. On the contrary, we believe that a due consideration of the question, joined to attentive obser- vation of the insane, will always lead to the conclusion that there are no moral diseases strictly so called; that, although attended by moral symptoms, they depend on physical processes, and that, as in- digestion may produce that delusion called night-mare in sleep, so other conditions of the body may produce those delusions called in- sanity in the waking state. Though the most striking symptoms of insanity are moral pheno- mena, they do not prove that it is a moral disease ; lor whether the operations of the mind are the functions of the brain, according to the materialist; or the actions of a spirit superadded to the brain,— still, whenever this organ is diseased, the most striking symptoms will be a disorder in the mind. That there is often not enough of bodily disease to explain satisfactorily the mental disorder (because a person may be at the same time stark mad and in tolerable health) is only a plausible error, built on the erroneous supposition, that the bodily disease which most forcibly strikes the attention of the observer, is that which is most capable of disordering the mind of the patient. So far from this being true, when insanity arises from a blow on the head, disease in the brain, or child-birth, in which case the physical nature of the malady admits of no question, mental de- rangement is often the principal sign which manifests the existence of the bodily state on which it depends. That moral management is sometimes the best remedy, nay, sometimes operates bv intellectual processes;—as when insanity is