On hereditary insanity / by Hugh Grainger Stewart.

  • Stewart, Hugh Grainger.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On hereditary insanity / by Hugh Grainger Stewart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Esqtjieol.1 Mania. 24'9 per cent. Melancholia. 48-67 per cent. Melancholia, after dipsomania, seems to have the greatest ten¬ dency to appear in the hereditarily predisposed, and idiocy and im¬ becility, dementia, and fatuity, the least. I have not been able to construct a table showing the form of insanity appearing in the father, and contrasting it with that which appeared in his offspring. 1 he materials at disposal for such, a purpose are necessarily very few, and difficult to obtain. Moreau2 considers hereditary predisposition complete, when the descendants have the same intellectual disorders as their parents, produced by the same causes, at the same time of life; and incom¬ plete, when the disorder is not the same as in the parents, but manifest a filiation to their disease. Cases of hereditary predisposition have been divided into four classes.3 First, those in whom the nervous temperament is con¬ genital, such cases are more liable to insanity than others, they become easily excited under different circumstances, and the nervous condition created by the hereditary tendency is such that the most trifling causes produce in them madness. Second In this class hereditary predisposition manifests itself in intellectual, physical, and moral phenomena, which approach insanity. The insanity appears moie in the acts than in the wrords. Such cases are eccen¬ tric, irregular, and sometimes immoral in action. They are incapable of directing their faculties to any wise or useful object; they may ia\e some brilliant points, but, in spite of these, they are intel¬ lectually sterile, and sometimes physically so. They produce absurd schemes, are discoverers of utopian impossibilities, and attempt the resolution of insoluble problems. Their mania is of short duration, and comes on in sudden paroxysms, in which they commit dangerous acts, the nervous temperament uenerallv nrevails. and