Insanity : its classification, diagnosis, and treatment; a manual for students and practitioners of medicine / by E. C. Spitzka.

  • Spitzka, E. C. (Edward Charles), 1852-1914.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity : its classification, diagnosis, and treatment; a manual for students and practitioners of medicine / by E. C. Spitzka. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    the mind, not provoked by any external cause, which do not fall within the strict conception of insanity, and must be excluded in its definition. The phenomena of halluci- natory insanity and stupor are closely simulated by febrile delirium and coma; Indian hemp produces a condition very much like a mild form of expansive mania; finally, alcoholic intoxication imitates in its various degrees almost every phase of paretic .dementia. In excluding the phenomena of intoxication it is necessary to employ the qualifying adjective acute, because the chronic intoxications producing those results detailed in the definition, are actual insanities; alcoholic and opium insan- ity being examples. The bearing of the remaining qualifying clauses is almost self-evident. Several of them would be unnecessary but for the desirability of meeting even the most finical and hypercritical objections in a definition whose chief uses are of a medico-legal nature. The ordinary phenomena of epi- lepsy, hysteria, and the immediate results of nervous injury and shock are not insanity; but the extraordinary complica- tions of the ordinary nervous diseases and the remote con- sequences of nervous shock and injury, if these lead to the development of the signs included in the first clauses of the definition, respectively become insanity of the epileptic, hysterical, choreic, and traumatic variety. Mental concentration and preoccupation lead to some of the results which might be included under the clause, in- ability to correctly register and reproduce impressions in sufficient number and intensity to serve as guides to action in consonance with the individual's age and surroundings. The abstracted man stuffing his pipe with his neighbor's finger, the Scotch professor, who, reminded that he had omitted to apologize to a lady against whom he had stum- bled, politely excused himself to the cow who next collided with him, Archimedes oblivious that the soldier rushing into his apartment, where he was engaged over a geometrical problem, was about to kill him, the soldier who, in the ex- altation of battle, rushes on after receiving a fatal wound,— are all instances of the action of physiological laws, whose results have a superficial, but only a very superficial, resem- blance to the abstraction of certain demented patients, and which require to be excluded by the physician when defin- ing insanity to those who are, or affect to be, misled by sur- face resemblances.