Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, held at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow, August 2nd, 1882 / by W.T. Gairdner.

Date:
[1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, held at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow, August 2nd, 1882 / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    temptation of venality in the practice of your art, you are by no means secure against the tendency inherent in all specialisms, legitimate or otherwise, to dissociate their culti- vators from the general stream of tendency, so to speak, and from the actual facts and principles of the healing art in general. In some respects you are perhaps more than most others in danger of this. For you can, if you so please, live, and even live happily and well employed, quite apart from medical progress, and from general medical society. You have large administrative as well as strictly medical functions, and it would be by no means surprising were the former in a great measure to supplant the latter, and the treatment of the insane to become a specialism wholly divorced from the progress of medical science and of the medical art. It is not too much to say that whatever else is intended by it, the honour you have done me in placing me in this chair is a distinct recognition of the fact that such divorce is possible, and that you would regard it as a misfortune. You wish to draw closer the bond between psychological medicine and general medicine. You wish to declare somewhat emphatically that while you are, officially, devoted to the treatment of the insane, you have not ceased to be physicians; that in dealing with the unsound mind you are dealing, not with the mind alone, but with the man; in other words that you are doing exactly what I am doing every day—considering a particular ailment in its relation to the whole of the functions that make up mind and body, and treating it accordingly. It is from this point of view that I am led to think that a few glimpses (for it can be no more) into some of the rela- tions existing between your specialism and the healing art in general may be made interesting during the limited time at our disposal. But to such of you as have devoted attention (as I daresay we all have more or less) to the intricate questions arising out of cerebral and mental pathology as bearing on the cause or causes ot insanity, the responsibility and capacity of the insane, and other subjects which grow out of the very depths of the philosophy of mind as related to organisation, I have to say that I shall not to- day enter on any of these difficult questions. I am not, indeed, at all wedded to any theory of the association of “ Mind and Brain,” or of “ Body and Mind; ” but I hold it to be an unquestionable truth that the analogies, and even the laws, of bodily function shed an immense amount of light on the study of mental diseases, and vice versa.