Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THOUGHTS ON INSANITY AS AN OBJECT OF MORAL SCIENCE. It is a popular belief that insanity is a disease not in our physical but our moral constitution. This is not a speculation merely, but leads to various practical conclusions: that it is a subject rather for metaphysical than for medical inquiry; that a physician is requisite for a mad-house only as he is for a school or prison; that the true theory of these mysterious diseases will be found in some extraordinary obliquities of thought, the true cure in some moral regimen, some training system for the weak, or crooked faculties of the understanding. " Of late, however, it has been seriously proposed in a " great degree to remove both the medical treatment and " moral management of insane persons from thy care of phy- " sicians, and to transfer this important and responsible de- " partment of medicine into the hands of magistrates and " senators." " Most persons who have not received a me- " dical education have been fully persuaded they could arrange " and compose it in its utmost state of distraction."—Haslam on the Moral Management of Insane Persons, pp. 2, 6. There are many diseases in which some of the faculties of the mind in a certain degree deviate from their natural state: such are the incubus or nightmare; severe and habitual indigestion, so often attended by lassitude of mind and depression of spirits; the hypochondriasis of liver disease; the strange and different forms of hysteria; and lastly, but most remarkably, fever attended by delirium: no one supposes these to be moral diseases; no doubt is entertained that the mind is affected by disease of the body; the mental symptoms are universally considered as the natural effects and signs of disturbance in the brain ; a man of plain sense, therefore, familiarly ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.