Insanity and its treatment : lectures on the treatment, medical and legal, of insane patients / by G. Fielding Blandford.

  • Blandford, G. Fielding (George Fielding), 1829-1911.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity and its treatment : lectures on the treatment, medical and legal, of insane patients / by G. Fielding Blandford. 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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    general use. It is the difficulty in speaking upon the sub- ject with the precision and certainty demanded by those who are learning how to deal medically with a grave disorder. The lecturer on Medicine, when speaking of diseases of lung, heart, or kidney, can lay down the pathology in a way that to a psychologist is at present impossible. He can put his finger on the exact seat of the malady, can say what is going on amiss during life, and what will be discovered after death, and can speak with exactness of both the early and late symptoms. Far different is it when we have to teach the nature or treatment of that which we call Insanity—to speak not of respiration, circulation, or digestion, but of mind, of feelings, and ideas, in an abnormal or distorted state. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the only method by which we shall attain an insight into the mysterious pheno- mena of unsound mind, is to keep ever before us the fact that disorder of the mind means disorder of the brain, and that the latter is an organ liable to disease and disturbance, like other organs of the body, to be investigated by the same methods, and subject to the same laws. In speaking of the pathology of Insanity, I have endeavoured to keep this in view. For utterances too dogmatic, for iterations and recapitula- tions too numerous, and for the too frequent presence of the personal pronoun, the form and style of lectures, which I have thought fit to preserve, must be my apology. So, too, I have omitted references beyond a very few. To many authors, home and foreign, whose works I have con- sulted, I am under obligations not easy to acknowledge. Especially I would mention the now numerous volumes^ of the Journal of Mental Science, which constitute a mine r of information on this special subject, having, I believe, no equal. And I am not a little indebted for advice, sugges- tions, and corrections to many friends.