Practical observations on mental and nervous disorders / by Alfred Beaumont Maddock ; illustrated with cases.

  • Maddock, Alfred Beaumont.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Practical observations on mental and nervous disorders / by Alfred Beaumont Maddock ; illustrated with cases. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    A striking peculiarity in the character of nervous individuals is predisposition, which term may, for convenience, be divided into hereditary and acquired, the existence of which, as exercising a powerful influence in the production of disease, numerous and oft-recurring observations leave no room to doubt. By hereditary predisposition is to be understood, a tendency to contract or to exhibit some one or more particular or special disease, the peculiar hability to which, is transmitted from parent to child. It is well known, that in occasional extreme cases, all and each of the children of a marriage have been subject to, or have died from, and at or near to the same age, some specific disease of the brain, heart, lungs, stomach, or other vital organ. Frequent instances of this kind, must have been noticed by the most careless observer. Although this morbid degree of - delicacy and sensibility in the system, may unfortunately be transmitted to such individuals, as an .hereditary legacy from one or both parents, yet it as frequently, if not oftener, becomes engrafted on the constitution, as an after consequence of other diseases, or is induced by irregularity in the mode of living, by long-continued unhealthy occupations, or by great mental anxiety. Cliildren too, are often brought into the world with sickly constitutions, and with predisposition to disease, arising from antecedent circumstances, connected with the union of their parents. Marriages contracted too early, or too late in life, or those entered into between parties too nearly allied by blood, or by those in whom there exists too great a disparity in years, are peculiarly open to this objection. Not alone the habitual state of health of the parents, but even also the condition of their mental, as well as bodily powers at the period of concep-