Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon Diseases of the Mind

📖 The Scoop

From the author's Preface.
Agreeably to a promise made to the public some years ago, and in compliance with the solicitations of the author's pupils, he now offers to them a volume of Medical Inquiries and Observations, upon the Diseases of the Mind.
The views which he has taken of the proximate cause, forms, and symptoms of those diseases, have obliged him to employ a new nomenclature to designate some of them. This becomes no less necessary where new opinions are proposed, or new symptoms described in the history of diseases, than an increase in the number of words, and new combinations of them, become necessary to accompany the increase of the wants and objects of civilized society.
Some of the facts contained in the following pages are of an old date, and will be familiar to the medical reader, but the republication of them, it is hoped will be excused, when it is perceived, that they are placed under the direction of new principles, and that new inferences of a practical nature are deduced from them. An apology may seem necessary likewise for the large number of recent facts that have been added to them. Upon subjects so interesting as the present, more than common testimony is necessary to produce conviction. Besides, facts, or precedents, have the same effects in reasoning in medicine, that examples have in morals. They compel the reader to admit the practice they are intended to establish, provided they are applied in a proper manner. The author has omitted referring to the books from which he has obtained some of his facts. His reason for doing so was, when he began to collect them, he did not expect to publish them, and of course did not mark the volumes and pages from which they were extracted. Since he formed that design, he has faithfully preserved references to them both. He has suppressed them, only because their partial publication would have destroyed the uniformity of the work. He commits his imperfect labours, now before the reader, to his fellow citizens, with a hope that they may serve as a supplement to materials already collected, from which a system of principles may be formed that shall lead to general success in the treatment of the diseases of the mind. Experience has exhausted herself in abortive efforts for that purpose, and should the following attempt to co-operate with her by principles be alike unsuccessful, it must be ascribed to their being erroneous, for the author believes those diseases can be brought under the dominion of medicine, only by just theories of their seats and proximate cause.

Genre: History / General (fancy, right?)