Medico-legal reflections on the trial of Daniel M'Naughten, for the murder of Mr. Drummond : with remarks on the different forms of insanity, and the irresponsibility of the insane / by James George Davey ; with an appendix.

Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medico-legal reflections on the trial of Daniel M'Naughten, for the murder of Mr. Drummond : with remarks on the different forms of insanity, and the irresponsibility of the insane / by James George Davey ; with an appendix. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    G strate, either theoretically or practically, the structure and uses of the tricuspid, semilunar, and other valves, so beautifully arranged within this important organ, and acting as sentinels to the ingress and egress of the vital fluid pursuing its unvarying course, and so providently harmonizing with the whole design : imagine him, I say, deputed to demonstrate the relative structures of the ventricles and auricles, and their peculiar organic adaptation to the functions required of them individually, including too, the evidences of disease of these several parts enumerated—where, I ask the student of physiology and pathology desirous of correct views, would he limit his disap- pointment, his disgust, at being thus tortured with a shadow ? Let the humane picture to himself the protracted sufferings of all those poor patients, who in the hope of relief from disease of the organ we are considering, had placed themselves under the care of a physician whose treatment of their cases would be based on such superficial and dangerous views of anatomy and physiology. To comprehend, then, the circulation of the blood in the human body, it is seen how necessary it is to be possessed of correct flews of the anatomy of the heart, and of its several parts, their relative position and mutual dependency. Nothing too can be more self-evident than that a knowledge of the healthy function of the organ must necessarily precede correct notions of the derangements to which it may be subject; of, in one word, its diseases. The application of the above argument to the due consideration of what relates to the anatomy, physiology and pathology of the brain, will be seen as the reader proceeds. The entire brain, it must be well remembered, is nothing more or less than a union of parts, or organs, which are no less variously combined into one whole, than are the individual features of the entire face; and just, as in the latter instance the physiognomy takes its peculiarity from their relative and reciprocal arrangement and form, so in the former does the character of man, in one word, his mind, take its peculiarity from the combination of the parts or organs of the brain before mentioned. This doctrine will be readily recognised as that of the immortal Gall, previously to whose great and imperishable discoveries, our knowledge of the brain, and its uses and diseases, were in no less crude and unsatisfactory a state than that of the circulation previously to the time of the great Harvey. The brain is one of the many parts of the body, and like the heart, the liver, the lungs, &c., is of course subject to the same general