On brain and nerve exhaustion : "neurasthenia", its nature and curative treatment / by Thomas Stretch Dowse.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On brain and nerve exhaustion : "neurasthenia", its nature and curative treatment / by Thomas Stretch Dowse. 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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    the nervous schema cells, due to inhibition of their proper nutritive pabulum. It is now a pretty generally received doctrine, that there can be no abnormal condition of mind per se. It must arise from some molecular derangement of the brain-cells, from poisonous material floating in the blood, or from an altered condition in the arterial current either in quantity or quality. But I am much inclined to believe that, independent of the mutual relationship existing func- tionally between mind and body, we ought to take into consideration what seems to be a fact of no small impor- tance—namely, the generation and accumulation of what might be termed psychic force, as distinct from nerve force, and which, in my opinion, acts upon and in co-relation with it. I have known men whose intellects were in common par- lance obtuse enough, but under the influence of wine the brain would become stimulated into new life, and their pre- viously dormant intellectual faculties shine forth in lustrous and resplendent ideas. The great interest, that attaches itself to the connecting link between the material and the immaterial, the psychical and the physical, the volitional and automatic, is of such magnitude, and fraught with so much profound philosophical research from the early ages of reasoning, that the more its investigation is carried on, the greater appears to be the ex- tent of illimitable space which is opened before us. Modern writers of a somewhat careless and indifferent mode of reasoning (I mean in a purely philosophical direc- tion) have attributed, and with truth, this state of things to a want of candour on the part of the purely metaphysical school—a want of concession to undoubted physical truths —and an utter disregard of the rapid advance, which has of late years been made into the structure of the nervous system, and the seats of propagation, and mode of conduc- tion of nerve force. Here the clinical worker, in the field of diseased nerve-states will most assuredly in the course of 3—2