CONTENTS. LECTURES. PAGE . 120 BODY AND MIND: AN INQUIRY INTO THEIR CONNECTION AND MUTUAL INFLUENCE, SPECIALLY IN REFERENCE TO MENTAL DISORDERS. LECTURE I. GENTLEMEN: The relations of mind and body in health and in disease I have chosen as the subject of these lectures, not with the hope of doing full justice to so complex and difficult an inquiry, but because it has for some time been my special work, and there was no other subject on which I should have felt myself equally justified in addressing you. No one can be more deeply sensible than I am how little exact our knowledge is of the bodily conditions of mental functions, and how much of that which we think we know is vague, uncertain, and fluctuating. But the time has come when the immediate business which lies before any one who would advance our knowledge of mind unquestionably is a close and searching scrutiny of the bodily conditions of its manifestations in health and disease. It is most necessary now to make use of the results of the study of mind in health to light and guide our researches into its morbid phenomena, and in like manner to bring the instructive instances presented by unsound mind to bear upon the interpretation of its healthy functions. The physiology and the pathology of mind are two branches of one science; and he who studies the one must, if he would work wisely and well, study the other also. My aim will be to promote the reconciliation between them, and in doing so I shall embrace the occasion, whenever it offers itself, to indicate the principles which should guide our efforts for what must always be the highest object of medical science and art-the production and preservation of a sound mind in a sound body. Actually to accomplish much of this purpose will not lie in my power, but I may bring together fragmentary observations, point out the bearing of them on one another and on received opinions, thus unfold their meaning, and mark broadly the lines which future research must take. Within the memory of men now living insanity was such a special study, and its treatment such a special art, that it stood quite aloof from general medicine in a mysterious and mischievous isolation; owing little or nothing to the results of progress in other branches of medicine, and contributing nothing to their progress. The reason of this it is not hard to discover. The habit of viewing mind as an intangible entity or incorporeal essence, which science inherited from theology, prevented men from subjecting its phenomena to the same method of investigation as other natural phenomena; its disorders were thought to be an incomprehensible affliction and, in accordance with the theological notion, due to the presence of an evil spirit in the sufferer, or to the enslavement of the soul by sin, or to any thing but their true cause-bodily disease. Consequently, the treatment of the insane was not in the hands of intelligent physicians, who aimed to apply the resources of medicine to the alleviation or cure of bodily illness, but was given up to coarse and ignorant jailers, whose savage cruelties will for all time to come be a great and ugly blot upon the enlightenment of the age which tolerated them. Matters are happily changed now. On all hands it is admitted that the manifestations of mind take place through the nervous system; and that its derangements are the result ORGAN AND FUNCTION. 13 of nervous disease, amenable to the same method of investigation as other nervous diseases. Insanity has accordingly become a strictly medical study, and its treatment a branch of medical practice. Still, it is all too true that, notwithstanding we know much, and are day by day learning more, of the physiology of the nervous system, we are only on the threshold of the study of it as an instrument subserving mental function. We know little more positively than that it has such function; we know nothing whatever of the physics and of the chemistry of thought. The conception of mind as a mysterious entity, different essentially from, and vastly superior to, the body which it inhabits and uses as its earthly tenement, but from which its noblest aspirations are thought to be to get free, still works openly or in a latent way to obstruct the study of its functions by the methods of physical research. Without speculating at all concerning the nature of mind-which, let me distinctly declare at the outset, is a question which science cannot touch, and I do not dream of attempting to touch-I do not shrink from saying that we shall make no progress toward a mental science if we begin by depreciating the body: not by disdaining it, as metaphysicians, religious ascetics, and maniacs have done, but by laboring in an earnest and inquiring spirit to understand it; shall we make any step forward; and when we have fully comprehended its functions, when we know how to estimate fitly this highest, most complex, and wonderful achievement of organized skill, it will be quite time, if there be then the inclination, to look down upon it with contempt. The truth is, that in inquiries concerning mind, as was once the case in speculations concerning other natural phenomena of forces, it has been the practice to begin where the inquiry should have ended. Just as the laws of physical actions were evoked out of the depths of human consciousness, and the relations of bodies to one another attributed to sympathies and antipathies, attractions and abhorrences, instead |