A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 — John Shaqi
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
Through the disharmonies and inevitable disruption of a
self-disorganizing civilization, the Greek and Roman world was plunged
into the dark centuries during which the perils of the soul and the
sacrificial attainment of salvation by monastic life and crusades
threatened to overshadow all other concern. This had some inevitable
results: it favored all those views through which the soul became like a
special thing or substance, in contrast to and yet a counterpart of the
physical body. As long as there was no objective experimental science,
the culminating solution of life problems had to be intrusted to that
remarkable development of religious philosophy which arose from the
blending of Hebrew religion and tradition and the loftiest products of
the Greek mind, in the form which St. Paul and the early Church fathers
gave to the teachings of Christ. From being the form and activation, or
function, of the organism in life, the soul feature of man was given an
appearance in which it could neither be grasped nor understood, nor
shaped, nor guided by man when it got into trouble. From the Middle Ages
there arose an artificial soul and an artificial world of souls
presented as being in eternal conflict with the evil of the flesh--_and
thus the house of human nature was divided against itself_.
Science of the nineteenth century came nearer bringing mind and body
together again. The new astronomical conception of the world and the
growing objective experimental science gradually began to command
confidence, and from being a destroyer of excessively dogmatic notions,
science began to rise to its modern constructive and creative position.
But the problem of _mind_ remained on a wrong basis and still does so
even with most scientists. Too much had been claimed for the psyche, and
because of the singling out of a great world of spirit, the world of
fact had been compromised and left cold and dry and unattractive and
unpromising. No doubt it was necessary that the scientist should become
hardened and weaned from all misleading expectation, and shy of all the
spurious claims of sordid superstition and of childish fancy. He may
have been unduly radical in cutting out everything that in any way
recalled the misleading notions. In the end, we had to go through a
stage of psychology without a "soul," and lately even a psychology
without "consciousness," so that we might be safe from unscientific
pretensions. All the gyrations no doubt tended to retard the wholesome
practical attack upon the problems in the form in which we find them in
our common-sense life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account