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: CHAPTER III. Classification Of Mkntal Disorders. When we come to the question of the classification of the different forms of insanity we find a condition of affairs quite as unsatisfactory as that which confronted us in attempting to define it. Almost every author of note lias put forth his own separate classification and we are treated to all kinds from the simplest comprising only three or four groups to the most complex comprising forty or fifty or even more. The prohlcm of classification ha been approached from every side: the psychological, the pathological, the etiological, and the clinical, and while some a:;'hor adhere to one point of view the majority do not, but offer a t-A .-.ification based on all four considerations. This latter position i practically necessary as there are types which lend them- only to classification from one of these standpoints and no classification on any other basis. A a matter of fact our knowledge of insanity is altogether f//o limited at present to justify the expectation that the problem if f lav-. ification can be solved. Any attempt at grouping mental d.v/r'U-r under separate heads must at present be but tentative HiA incomplete. The author will not attempt to offer any scheme of 'lav.ification but in the various chapters of this work will the forms of mental disorder which are generally acknowl- to exist and while endeavoring to give a clear picture of will take the broad view which realizes that the different forms of mental derangement are not capable of clean-cut de- markationt but that on the contrary many of the present groups will in the course of time be broken up into smaller groups as we come to more accurately differentiate cases and appreciate more fully the true value of signs and symptoms. In fact, we are only begi...