A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 5 : $b Diseases of the nervous system
Science
A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 5 : $b Diseases of the nervous system
Medicine -- Practice
Undoubtedly, a great portion of the mental and nervous disorder
commonly attributed to heredity is largely caused or aggravated by
imitation and by vicious training of children. Schopenhauer says that
the normal man is two-thirds will and one-third intellect—in other
words, two-thirds made by education and one-third by inheritance. The
intellect is often trained so as to enfeeble the will as well as to
hinder the development of the physical man. Self-culture may so
degenerate into self-indulgence as to destroy individuality and force;
and mental health, as a rule, depends upon bodily health and the
exercise of self-control.
In the uncivilized and half-civilized races of the world insanity is
rare; in the early civilizations the insane perished from neglect,
were hanged and burned, starved and died in famine and pestilence, and
fell among the foremost in war. Some of the tribes of North American
Indians shoot the insane, considering them possessed of evil spirits,
while their white neighbors keep them in chains and squalor.
Civilization brings better food, clothing, and shelter, and less
danger from war, famine, and pestilence than savage or mediæval times.
In the struggle for existence, however, physical strength no longer
wholly wins the day, but also those faculties that involve great
mental and bodily strain in mines, factories, crowded tenements,
counting-rooms, offices; in the eager, excited over-study for prizes
or rank in overheated, badly-ventilated schools, and, indeed, in every
walk of life. People with marked neuroses, who would have gone to the
wall a couple of centuries ago from want of physical strength, now
support themselves by indoor light work, marry, and reproduce their
kind. Minute division of labor involves monotonous toil and increases
the impairment of the body's resistance to mental and nervous strain,
and abuse of the nerve-stimulants tea, coffee, tobacco, or, worst of
all, alcohol and narcotics, add to the evil. Degeneration due to the
reproduction of poor stock is intensified by intermarriage. Luxury,
idleness, excesses, syphilis, debility, drunkenness, poverty, disease,
and overwork produce vitiated constitutions in which varying types of
insanity appear in various nations and climates, but, so far as is
known at present, not in very different degree under similar
conditions. One of the great problems of the day is whether the many
conditions incompatible with health in our crowded populations can be
overcome so as to prevent the degeneration going on thereby.
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.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account