A pathological classification of mental disease / by J. Batty Tuke, M.D.

  • Tuke, J. Batty, Sir (John Batty), 1835-1913.
Date:
[©1870?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A pathological classification of mental disease / by J. Batty Tuke, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    He then boldly stated— I now commence a course of clinical demonstrations and discussions, in which mental and nervous diseases are, for the first time, to be made the subject of instruction in union with each 6ther. The position will also, on this occasion, be out- wardly and practically realized, that diseases of the nervous system form one inseparable whole of which the so-called mental diseases only embrace a certain moderate proportion. This position is by no means one which has been accepted as a matter of course. It is a scientific acquisition only of the present day, the recognition of which will cause great changes, remove many errors, and must open up new developments in all directions. A comparatively small proportion of nervous diseases are found in asylums ; and they are placed there only from out- ward considerations of treatment and protection, such as the necessity for separation from the ordinary conditions of life, isolation, occupation, &c. The phase of our specialism, in which these alone were recognised as coming within its province, has now been passed through, and I believe that the time will soon arrive when only those will be true speciahsts in psychiatry who survey the whole domain of nervous dis- ease, and cultivate it as widely as possible. It has been supposed up to the present time that the study of mental disease was distinguished by some dif&culty, 8ui generis, and that the study of ordinary medicine had no du-ect' bearing upon it, that the only entrance to psychiatry lay through the dark portals of metaphysics. And yet the other cerebral and nervous diseases which, with the so-called mental diseases, form an inseparable whole, have not, so far as I am aware, been hitherto much elucidated by metaphysics; and, in Germany, the time has quite passed away when psychiatry could be developed from a specially philosophico-psychological point of view, etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, and thera- peutics are the departments in which we must seek both our work, and that being successfully accomplished, also our fame. Therapeutics especially derive the greatest advantage from such individual study of all nervous diseases. Every acquisi- tion in one branch of the subject exerts a beneficial influence upon the whole. * The student of mental disease must deeply deplore that Griesinger was not spared to work out his system, for by this * Translated by Dr. John Sibbald. Journal of Mental Science, January, 1867.