Nervous and mental diseases / by Archibald Church and Frederick Peterson.

  • Church, Archibald, 1861-1952.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nervous and mental diseases / by Archibald Church and Frederick Peterson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    It may be called the moral and manual method. The moral part of it is the opportunity for education, regular occupation, and recreation. The manual and hygienic part of it, the acquisition of out-of-door trades or callings—muscular exercise, which in itself serves to reduce the number and intensity of convulsive seizures. I may be pardoned for dwelling somewhat longer on this subject of preventive therapy, and for allowing my pen to go over the same lines which it has traveled so often in past years, because I am convinced that this moral treatment marks the greatest stride in advance made for centuries in the thera- peutics of epilepsy. For ages drugs have been exploited as helpful or curative ; but, after all, little has been accomplished from the standpoint of materia medica. Only of late years has the moral treatment become prominent. As a rule, the epileptic patient was dismissed by his physician with a prescription of uncertain value and possibly a few general direc- tions as to diet. It was not known to the practitioner—or, at least, he did not concern himself about the matter—that the epileptic could gain admission to no hospital of any kind ; that he had no associates, occu- pation, or recreation ; that, debarred from the schools, he grew up un- educated, and with a tendency toward retrogression rather than progress ; and that, without teaching, reared in idleness, suffering from a dreadful malady, neglected in body and mind, he could find shelter at last only in the almshouses and insane asylums, these being the only institutions open to him. Yet, in by far the majority of cases of epilepsy, the attacks rob them for but brief intervals of the capacities for study, work, recreation, and social pastimes, which they possess in common with their more fortunate fellow-men. Hence the adoption of a scheme of colonization of epileptic dependents on the model of the great German colony at Bielefeld, of which the Craig Colony, in the State of New York, is an example. The Craig Colony consists of a tract of nearly nineteen hundred acres of land in the most fertile, productive, and pictur- esque valley of the State (the Genesee Valley). Upon this are already some sixty to eighty buildings^ with accommodations at present for but 840 patients. Over eleven hundred epileptics are now on the list of patients awaiting admission. Here they are to be given an education in the various branches of learning taught in the public schools, to be instructed in every kind of industry, to be treated each and every one for epilepsy, and to be offered a home in a sort of village life, where they will no longer have the feeling of social ostracism, or be debarred from the privileges of intellectual and moral development enjoyed by the rest of mankind. The out-of-door life in a farming community has already had wonderful results, which may be learned from the annual reports of the colony. It will suffice to say here that the average reduction in frequency of attacks among all the patients has been fully fifty per cent., and that the mental and moral regeneration of the beneficiaries has been truly remarkable. What the effect of such change of environ- ment must be as a prophylactic against psychic degeneration and insanity can not be estimated. We may now briefiy touch upon the medicinal and surgical treatment of epilepsy. Tlie old drugs—borax, nitrate of