Disease and Its CausesCouncilman, W. T. (William Thomas)
Science
Disease and Its Causes
Councilman, W. T. (William Thomas)
Diseases -- Causes and theories of causation
There is no very sharp line between insanity and criminality. The
criminal is in direct antagonism to the laws of social life. An insane
person may cause the same injury to society as a criminal, but his
actions are not voluntary, whereas the criminal is one who can control
his actions, but does not. Mentally degenerated persons, however, can
be both insane and criminal. Whatever the state of society, this
reprobates the actions of one opposed to it; in a society in which it
were usual to appropriate the possessions of others or to devour
unpleasant or useless relatives, virtue and lack of appetite would be
reprobated as unsocial.
The symptoms of insanity or the manner in which the defective action
of the brain expresses itself and the various underlying pathological
changes vary, and by combining these it has been possible to subdivide
insanity into a number of distinct forms. There are both intrinsic and
extrinsic causes of insanity. The intrinsic are the structural
differences in the brain as compared with the normal or usual, whether
these are due to imperfection in development or to defective heredity
or to the injury of disease; the extrinsic causes are those which come
from without and bring the intrinsic into activity. Syphilis is a
frequent cause of insanity, and probably the only cause of the
condition known as general paralysis of the insane, acting by means of
the injury which it produces in the cortex of the brain. The abuse of
alcohol is another fertile cause, but the changes produced in this are
not so obvious as in the case of syphilis. Tumors of the brain are not
infrequently a cause, and the same is true of infections, even those
not located in the brain. How susceptible the brain is to the effects
of the toxines of the infectious diseases is shown in the frequency of
delirium in these diseases. There is an interesting relation between
this and alcoholism. Alcohol abuse may produce injury, but not
sufficient to manifest itself under ordinary conditions; when,
however, the action of toxic substance is superadded to the effect of
the alcohol the delirium of fever is more marked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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