Puberty and adolescence medico-psychologically considered / by T.S. Clouston.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Puberty and adolescence medico-psychologically considered / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    MEDICO-PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. When one considers the enormous differences in the physiological life and prevailing brain activity of the same human being at the different periods of life, it does not seem wonderful that each period has its own type of psychological disturbances, just as it has its special kinds of ordinary disease. Indeed, it would be very wonder- ful if the brain of a child, whose chief characteristics are active development, intense inquisitiveness in all directions, great sensi- tiveness to impressions, which succeed each other rapidly, and, whether they are painful or pleasurable, leave - only slight lasting traces, if this organ manifested quite the same disturbances when its mental functions become deranged as the brain of an old man, whose chief characteristics are retrogression in all its activities, and insensitiveness to ordinary impressions. The essential qualities of the two organs are in many respects different; their receptive, dynamical, and trophic activities are quite dissimilar. Then what a change in the mental activity of the brain does the period of puberty cause! Looking at the matter from the combined point of view of physiologists and psychologists, we must connect the new development of the affective faculties, the new ideas, the new interests in life, the new desires and organic cravings, the new delight in a certain sort of poetry and romance, with a new evolu- tion of function in certain parts of the brain that had lain dormant before. This awakening into intense activity of such vast tracts of encephalic tissue, though provided for in the evolution of the organ, does not take place without much risk of disturbance to its mental functions, especially where there is an inherited predis- position in that direction. And if this predisposition is thus developed into actual derangement of function, it happens, as might have been surely predicated a priori, that the type of derangement is much inHuenced by the great function of the re- production of the species then arising de novo. To form a right conception of the kinda of mental disease that occur at the various important periods of life it is essential that wo consider