The study of mental disease : being the introductory lecture delivered in the University of Edinburgh on the institution of the Lectureship on Mental Diseases, May 1879 / by T.S. Clouston.

Date:
1879
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The study of mental disease : being the introductory lecture delivered in the University of Edinburgh on the institution of the Lectureship on Mental Diseases, May 1879 / by T.S. Clouston. 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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    Morningside, and many more from among his pupils. It is to the late Professor Laycock that this University is indebted for intro- ducing the teaching of Medical Psychology and Mental Diseases in 1857. He had devoted much attention to obscure nervous affec- tions, he had a true zeal for the study of mind and mental aberra- tion from a physiological point of view. His was a speculative mind, with a strong tendency to weave the facts which he gathered from every source and the speculations they excited in his mind into a great web of all-embracing generalization. His teaching •was very suggestive, and it undoubtedly had the effect of directing the minds of many of his students towards the mental as well as the other functions of the brain. It was the means of influencing many of them in the line of study they took up. I find that no fewer than ten of the physician-superintendents of Scotch asylums were students of his ; and there are still more men who have held important lunacy appointments in England, who were his students*. No branch of physiology or medicine is now more actively studied than the field of brain function and disease; there has been a marked revival lately, to which Dr Laycock undoubtedly contributed; in fact, some of the most energetic writers in general cerebral physiology and pathology derived some of their original impulses from him. When I mention the names of Drs Hughlings-Jackson, Rutherford, Ferrier, LauderBrunton, M'Kendrick, Crichton Browne, Herbert Major, Stirling, and Morrison Watson, who were all his students, I have said enough to prove this. Dr Laycock had the vantage-ground of the University position ; Dr Skae had posses- sion of the clinical field at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, and this division was the weak point of the teaching here. Dr Laycock knew this and deplored it, and when I was appointed to my present office in succession to Dr Skae in 1873, he made very flattering and earnest overtures to me to combine the advantages of both positions. I saw that not only was the divorce between theory and practice unnatural, but that to the students it was unfair and injurious. I therefore joined Dr Laycock by a private arrangement, and my association with him was a source of the utmost pleasure and much instruction to me during the three years we worked together. No one could take part in his course without being influenced by his comprehensive ideas of the subject. Those ideas are best expressed by the title of his chief work, Mind and Brain; or, the Correlations of Consciousness, and by the first part of the Synopsis of his course in the University Calendar : u An Exposition of the Relations of Con sciousness to the Laws of Life in general, and the Anatomy and Functions of the Brain in particular. Such was his idea of what is called Medical Psychology. In a strict sense this term is a misnomer; if psychology is a real science, it is one and indivisible, and you might as well talk of medical mathematics or medical physics as medical psychology. But inasmuch as medical men have not the time, and only a few of them the special aptitude for