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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    On some occasion the question of defining what is called legal insanity may be presented to the reader of these lines. When that question is asked, he may safely challenge the questioner to show him a broken leg or a case of small- pox in a hospital ward which is not a broken leg or a case of small-pox in law; to show him a tumor or a softening of the brain, which is meningitis or sclerosis in law, or to de- fine the conditions under which any disease-symptom be- comes an indication of health. When these conditions are complied with, and not till then, may the physician at- tempt to define insanity in law as distinguished from in- sanity in science. In the mean time he may rest contented with the dictum of one of the best legal authorities that that cannot be sanity in law which is insanity in science, just as nothing can be a fact in science and a fiction in law at one and the same time. CHAPTER II. The Delusions of the Insane. The characteristic evidences of insanity, although they are all manifestations of disordered action of the central ner- vous axis, may for practical purposes be divided into two groups: the mental symptoms proper, and the somatic, or the physical indications. While the former are mainly ob- jects of study for general diagnostic and medico-legal pur- poses, and furnish important hints for moral treatment, the latter constitute our guides for physical treatment, and en- lighten us, as far as signs observed during life can, as to the fundamental nature of the disorder. The significance of these physical evidences, however profound it appears to the experienced mental pathologist, is appreciable and in- teresting to the student only when taken in connection with what even the untutored eye regards as the essential and characteristic feature of insanity: its mental results. It is therefore best to begin the consideration of the subject with the latter. To probably no other class of symptoms of mental de- rangement does so much interest and interest of so mani- fold a character attach as to the delusions of the insane. These perversions of the conceptional sphere have indeed