Madness

Author : Henry Maudsley (1835-1918)

Title : The Pathology of Mind (1879)

Keywords: humanization, race-degeneracy, degeneration, vice, madness, crime, moral sense, decay, social unit, morbid development, epilepsy, neuroses.

Pages : Introduction | excerpt 1 | excerpt 2

Introduction

The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867) was later republished as two separate, larger volumes, The Physiology of Mind (1876) and The Pathology of Mind (1879). In these excerpts, taken from V. Skultans (ed.), Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1975), Maudsley traces the degeneration of ‘good moral feeling’. Whether from vice, madness or crime, the defective taint manifested in a decay of moral sense is inescapable.

Here, he sets out a relationship between crime, insanity and degeneration. In the second excerpt, Maudsley contributes to a debate that raged among social observers, sociologists and physicians in the second half of the nineteenth century: to what extent civilization itself contributed to the increase in insanity witnessed during this period.

Back to Madness Documents | Introduction | excerpt 1 | excerpt 2