The study of mental disease : being the introductory lecture delivered in the University of Edinburgh on the institution of the Lectureship on Mental Diseases, May 1879 / by T.S. Clouston.

Date:
1879
    THE STUDY OF MENTAL DISEASE: BEING THE Introductory Lecture delivered in the University of Edinburgh, on the Institution of the Lectureship on Mental Diseases, May 1879. BY T. S. CLOUSTON, M.D., F.K.C.P.E., rilYsK IAN-SUPERINTENDENT ROYAL EDINBURGH ASYLUM, LECTURER ON MENTAL DISEASES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. Reprinted from the Edinburgh Medical journal for July l8jg. EDINBURGH : OLIVER AND BOYD, TWEEDDALE COURT. MDCCCLXXIX.
    No text description is available for this image
    THE STUDY OF MENTAL DISEASE. All classes of men have generalized ideas of mind according to the daily experience and the practical necessities of life of each. It is not left to the philosopher, metaphysician, and psychologist to study mind. The jurist, politician, priest, and sociologist each has his own system of mental philosophy. Nay, the policeman and the horse-breaker have each a crisp and concise theory, learned in the schools of experience and tradition—not formulated it may be, but still perfectly definite and practical. The physician in practice has, as much as any other man, opportunities of seeing a wide range of mental phenomena. He comes into intimate personal "relationship with men and women in circumstances where the reasoning and feelings, the instincts and propensities of human nature are exposed to his view, with as little concealment or hypocrisy as is possible. There are very few of the serious diseases he treats but affect the minds of his patients more or less in some way. He has to study carefully the effects of their outward surroundings and of the im- pressions from without on the minds of his patients. He has to calculate the effect of his own speech and conduct, as well as those of all who surround them. He has to do with mind in its most undeveloped form up through all its stages of growth and educa- tion, and he ha3 the opportunity of seeing the effects on it of every form of disease and debility. In addition to this he is called on to treat mental symptoms, when through their striking abnormality they have themselves become a disease. The whole conduct of things in the world is necessarily so based on the assumption that every man is a responsible being with a sound mind, that any exception to this, when it occurs, has a very start- ling effect. In the early ages it was not admitted that such a thing was possible, and when a man's mind was clearly altered from its normal state, and his mental personality changed, they explained it by the theory that some other personality had entered temporarily into the man, driven out and overpowered the true occupant, and that the man was possessed with a devil, or some spirit good or bad