Responsibility in Mental Disease (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Responsibility in Mental Disease

Insane persons in asylums: how much they resemble and how much they differ from sane persons - Erroneous popular and legal notions - Feeling of repulsion towards insanity - Cruel treatment of the insane: from what causes it originated - Effects of the theological and the metaphysical spirit - Mind a function of brain, and disordered mind a result of disordered brain - Influence of bodily organs on mental function - Physiological method of inquiry indispensable; inadequacy of psychological method - Development of nervous system by education, and its necessary limits - They tyranny of organization - Hereditary crime - Moral responsibility - The criminal nature - Hereditary crime - The production of criminals: their defective physical and mental organization, and proneness to disease - Border-land between insanity and crime - Causes, course, and varieties of intellectual and moral degeneracy to be studied by the inductive method.

Notwithstanding the great change which has taken place in opinion and practice with regard to mental disease within the last century, there are still persons who, if invited to visit a lunatic asylum, would look on the proposal in much the same light as a proposal to visit the Zoological Gardens and inspect the wild beasts.

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