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A Pathological Classification of Mental Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2018

Extract

Nothing which has been written of late years so fully demonstrates the fact that Insanity is not regarded by the profession at large as a somatic disease, as the book intituled “The Nomenclature of Diseases, drawn up by a Joint Committee appointed by the Royal College of Physicians of London.” This work has been forwarded to every member of the medical profession in Great Britain and Ireland by the authority of the Registrar-General, and contains a list of some nine hundred diseases, a large assortment of poisons, and fifty-seven pages of accidents and malformations under which the British public is authorised to suffer or die. The mind of the Briton, however, is authorised to suffer from only six “Disorders of the Intellect;” the idea of disease as connected with madness is studiously ignored. On what principle the differentiation between a disease and a disorder is founded, or on what system of pathology the distinction is based, it is difficult to say; still, there the opinion stands expressed by very high authority, that Insanity is not a disease of the body, merely a disorder of the intellect.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1870 

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