Medical News Volume 85 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ...qua non of progress in the intellectual domain providing the normal intellect guides it and directs it in the proper channel, may become the origin of special pathological phenomena. The comnarative study of the physiological and pathological obsessions, also of delusions, shows that they represent various stages of the same mental analysis. The transformation of one form into another depends upon the favorable or unfavorable basis on which they develop. The mental analysis in a degenerate is always a source for various psychic disturbances; at first obsessions, later genuine delusions. In conclusion I wish to call attention to the curious hallucinations of my second patient. Some writers, basing their position upon anatomical data, deny the existence of unilaterality of hallucinations (Soury and others), while on the other hand its existence is admitted by many psychiatrists. But the tendency to explain all sorts of hallucinations by means of certain specific cortical localizations is in my judgment of the same order as the desire to find a relation between hysterical and organic anesthesias. Our anatomical and physiological knowledge of the cerebrum is as yet too incomplete to authorize us to explain properly even those psychic phenomena that are dependent upon certain cortical centers. Mental operations are exceedingly complex and any special center of the sensorium by itself is not at all sufficient for their realization. Unilaterality of hallucinations, despite its apparent contradiction, with our ana tomical conception of certain centers of the brain, exists nevertheless and, like many other mental phenomena, is not in a strict relationship with special cortical areas, but it depends upon multiple conditions. It should, therefore, ..