Observations on the deranged manifestations of the mind, or insanity / by J.G. Spurzheim.

  • Spurzheim, J. G. (Johann Gaspar), 1776-1832.
Date:
[1835], ©1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the deranged manifestations of the mind, or insanity / by J.G. Spurzheim. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    173/300 (page 159)
    any medical treatment. There are frequently patients who recover after that period. Therefore dismissing a patient after having been twelve months in St. Luke's hospital, they never make use of the term incurable ; they merely dismiss them uncured. Mr. Haslam has observed, that many patients are dismissed from Bethlem as cured w4io come back with relapse, and that others are sent away as incurable and recover. Dr. Hallaran finds it improper to give up as hopeless any case of insanity so long as the vigor of youth or disposition to a diversi- fied form of the disease has continned. He tells us more than we learn from the preceding statements, but it seems to me that the proposition is not sufficiently determinate. In many cases of young individuals insanity is incurable, though the body is vigor- ous ; and in many more weak persons insanity will be cured as soon as we shall better understand its nature. At St. Luke's hospital they are prudent in dismissing the patients only as un- cured ; but this expression is employed indiscriminately, and must be so long as we do not know the nature and cause of in- sanity, according to which aloiie it is to be declared incurable or curable. There are cases where insanity can be declared incurable, idiotism, for instance, from a defective organization of the brain, or fatuity from organic changes after a violent, continual, and chronic mania. But in many cases twelve months are not suf- ficient to give a decided opinion. Dr. Rush* relates, that manalgia has been cured in a woman who had been insane nine years. In another woman manalgia had continued two years, and was cured by an acute dysentery. Four patients have been cured of manalgia by abscesses at different parts of the body: one of them had passed a third of his life in the hospital at Phil- adelphia. At another passage f he mentions spontaneous recov- eries after the disease had continued eighteen and twenty years. Medieval Inquiries and Observations on the Diseases of the Mind, p. 223. Lib, cit. p. 155.