A plea for the scientific study of insanity : being the substance of addresses delivered before the Royal Academy of Medicine of Ireland, and the Medical Institution of Liverpool / by J. Batty Tuke.

  • Tuke, J. Batty, Sir (John Batty), 1835-1913.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A plea for the scientific study of insanity : being the substance of addresses delivered before the Royal Academy of Medicine of Ireland, and the Medical Institution of Liverpool / by J. Batty Tuke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    10/36 (page 6)
    old. The revulsion of public feeling against the system of cruelty and neglect under which the insane had suttered for centuries produced at the end of the last century a great change in tlieir condition. The large proportion were relegated to asylums, where for the first time they came under the super- vision of medical men. Almost inevitably the prominent symptom—mental aberration—forced itself on the minds of these observers, and their patients grouped themselves according as the prominent symptoms were exaltation, depression, or obfuscation of feeling. Nomenclature was based entirely on psychological considerations, and, altliough a large variety of such classifications were advanced, they all resolved themselves practically into the one enunciated two thousand years before by Hippocrates. The varieties of insanity were considered under the terms mania, melancholia, and dementia, which, to all intents and purposes, assumed in the mind of the profession and the public, the position of diseases. This position of matters necessarily served to concentrate attention unduly on the pyschological aspect of the condition, and to keep in the background the study of the physical conditions, of which the mental aberrations were mere symptoms. The one exception to this rule was general paralysis of the insane, which was marked off as a distinct pathological entity, possessing a fairly consistent etiology, symptomatology, and pathology. So strong was this pyschological influence, and so long did it continue unchecked, that we find in the Official ISTomenclature of Diseases drawn up • in 1871 by a Joint Committee of the Eoyal College of Physicians of London, all the insanities (general paralysis included) ranged under the head of Disorders of the Intellect, of which six were enumerated — mania, melancholia, dementia, paralysis of the insane, idiocy, imbecility. Surely nothing could show more thoroughly to what an exorbitant extent pyschology had domin- ated the study, and had influenced the profession, than this formal renunciation of any connection between disease and insanity on the part of such an important medical body, which