Hygiene of Nerves and Mind in Health and Disease (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI GENERAL CONCEPTIONS OF MENTAL, AND NERVOUS PATHOLOGY N the strength of an old dualistic prejudice according to which the mind is regarded as something different from the brain, a distinction has been made between mental and nervous diseases. This was a most unfortunate error, and even to-day in the public mind the notion of mental disease awakens visions of the madhouse and the attendant's keys. Even severe cases of mental disease are always referred to most na1vely as "nervous troubles " by the friends of the patient; who are greatly offended if any one ever uses the word insanity. Now to be sure we have no idea of maintaining that every nervous disease bears the character of a mental disease in the peculiar sense of the word. Yet the preceding chapters must have made it clear to every one that every disturbance of the central nervous system (even disturbances of the eye or the ear) involves mental functions; though only a general disturbance of the cerebral activity is able to seriously affect the personality, the ego, as a whole. But the converse is absolutely true: Every mental disturbance rests upon a disturbance of cerebral function. Whether this disturbance is serious enough to affect the man's responsibility in a legal sense, and his own interests and the interests of society demand his confinement in an asylum, is a question of purely administrative utility and has absolutely nothing to do with the purely scientific conception of mental and nervous disease. Very many people mentally affected are at large and do not require to be confined. It should be clear also from the first five chapters that diseases which affect only the peripheral ganglia are scarcely regarded by the public as nervous diseases at all; for at most they cause only ...