A treatise on medical jurisprudence and insanity : containing chapters on imbecility, nervousness, mental deficiency, drunkenness, delirium, and mental diseases in general / By Issac Ray ... with an introductory essay by D. Spillan.

  • Ray, Isaac, 1807-1881.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on medical jurisprudence and insanity : containing chapters on imbecility, nervousness, mental deficiency, drunkenness, delirium, and mental diseases in general / By Issac Ray ... with an introductory essay by D. Spillan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    dress decently, and requires, when up stairs, all the attention of a child, is seen by the medical practi- tioner, for the purpose of its being ascertained how far interference with his property is justifiable. The very servant who is hourly robbing him, takes care to send him down very carefully dressed. The mere effect of habit is to cause the patient himself to be more guarded and exact in his manner and words in the presence of a stranger ; he feels under a tempo- rary and a wholesome restraint; asks and answers common questions as well as most other old men, and is perfectly correct in his deportment. Two very serious evils may ensue. If the practitioner is unacquainted with the varieties of the mind and their tendencies; and imagines that insanity and sanity cannot be mixed up together in the mind as they are in the body ; he feels a degree of conscientious horror concerning any interference with an old gen- tleman who may be a little weak, but who, he is quite convinced, is no more mad than any of those about him. He turns his thoughts to the probable motives of interest, in the children or the friends, and, determining not to warrant any kind of re- straint, inwardly applauds his own sagacity and incor- ruptibility. The friends, now more afraid to interfere than before, allow the old man to do as he likes, and he sets off, and gets married to a worthless and designing woman, or he alters his will in favour of some unprincipled person, or finds his way to some neighbouring town, where he becomes a disgraceful spectacle, and gets robbed of his money and ill- treated ; or perhaps he falls into the pond, and is drowned; all the world then exclaiming against the heartlessness and inattention of those about him, and the unaccountable supineness of those who were consulted about the case. Thus, the view of a very