A text-book of psychiatry for physicians and students / by Leonardo Bianchi ; authorized translation from the Italian by James H. Macdonald.

  • Bianchi, Leonardo, 1848-1927.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A text-book of psychiatry for physicians and students / by Leonardo Bianchi ; authorized translation from the Italian by James H. Macdonald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    < PREFACE TO THE ITALIAN EDITION Various reasons have induced me, after hesitating long, to publish the ' Treatise on Psychiatry ' which I now have the honour of pre- senting to students and physicians. Of these reasons, one of the most weighty was the pressing demand for a work reflecting the actual state of the science, and that, moreover, an Italian work. I cherished no illusion as to the great difficulties involved in the task. A text-book which aims at concentrating what is most important for the understanding of the phenomena of psychic life, normal and abnormal, which would include within its narrow limits what is most assured, and offer ways and means to such as desire guidance or to develop in various directions their own thoughts—such a book cannot pretend to make use of all the rich patrimony of accumulated literature having reference to psychopathology. To supply the much-felt want of a book of clinical psychiatry was my sole object in publishing this treatise. My work, however, would not be deserving of praise had I limited myself to the description of the nosographic forms and varieties of the mental affections and to the critical examination of their pathology. To-day, in Italy, which has so largely contributed to the progress of the physiology and histology of the nerve-centres, one could not understand a book on psychiatry unless all the corollaries drawn from the various sources were utilized in the interpretation of the phenomena of psychic life. The physiology of the brain, on the solid foundations of morphology and histology, constitutes the heart and nutrient vessels of a medical work on psychiatry. For this reason I have deemed it useful to precede the description of the psychopathic forms with a first part, which summarizes the funda- mental laws of the evolution of the mind in relation to the evolution of the nervous system, as well as the architectural, anatomical, and physiological plan of the human brain, particularly in relation to mental phenomena, from the most elementary to the most complex,