Hallucinations and illusions : a study of the fallacies of perception / by Edmund Parish.

  • Parish, Edmund.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hallucinations and illusions : a study of the fallacies of perception / by Edmund Parish. 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.

    22/426 (page 2)
    hears that something—in fact, that he perceives it with his senses. Of course the observer is h'able to be misled by the expressions of the patient, whose loose use of words may lend his delire^ or mental delusion, the guise of a sensory impression. But a somewhat closer analysis will serve to make the distinction clear. When, for instance, a patient with peritonitis^ declares that a church congress is being held inside her, and says that she can feel it and so on, that is a mental delusion, originating in certain localised sensations in the abdomen, and not a fallacy of perception, for no one knows what a congress in such a locality would feel like. But should a further development take place, and the patient imagine that she hears the speeches and arguments of the contending parties in the con- gress, we then of course have an auditory hallucination. A similar case is that of the paralytic who imagined in persistent constipation that he carried the child of the Grand Duke of Baden within his body, and insisted that he would have to be delivered. Many such cases, as for instance those which result from tabes, as well as similar phenomena observed in hypochondriasis, are to be reckoned not as sensor}^ hallucinations, but as false inferences (Hoppe-) or as mental delusions^ (Westphal^). ^ Leuret, quoting Dagonet, Ti-aiti des maladies meiiiales. ^ Hoppe, Ei'kUirting der Sinnestdtischtuigen hei Gesunden ztnd Kranhen. ^ The term Sinnestauschung (sensory fallacy) has been regarded as misleaduig by L. INIeyer, Ueber den Charakter der Hallucinationen von Geisteskranken, in the Centralbl. f. d. nied. Wissensch. (1865), No. 43, and before him by Hecker, Ueber Visionen (1848), by the latter from an objection, based on a confusion of physiological and psycho- logical grounds, that the senses do not err, but that what is faithfully transmitted by them is falsely interpreted (compare Goethe, Die Sinne triigen nicht, aber das Urtheil triigt ; Michea, Du dJh're des