Restraint in the treatment of insanity / by G.F. Bodington.

  • Bodington, G. F.
Date:
[1878]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Restraint in the treatment of insanity / by G.F. Bodington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    ( RESTRAINT IN THE TREATMENT OF INSANITY. “Nil medium est'.' The pendulum of opinion is apt to swing too far. It swings, not seldom, so far beyond its due limit as to come to a dead-lock, and to check the machinery it ought to regulate. When suddenly released, a strong rebound occurs, and it swings again as much too far as it did before, but this time in the contrary direction. There is, perhaps, no department of human knowledge to which this illustration is inapplicable, no science nor art in which wild views have not at some time or other prevailed, none in which the reaction from wild views has not been productive of mischievous results. Dum vitant stulli vitia in contraria currant. This is not less tiue of medicine than of other sciences and arts. Possibly, indeed, it is more true of medicine than of most otheis. The vciy difficulties met with seem to invite certain minds, of an over-confident and utopian turn, to extremes of opinion and extravagancies of practice. I he intricacy and obscu- rity of the problems to be unravelled tempt men to plausible explanations, clever hypotheses, and the pro- pounding of well-rounded general laws. The desire to explain the inexplicable is a passion with many men, to whom a neat theory is better than the best of piactical views. Hence we have had, from time immemorial, doc- trines, and systems, and schools, and corypheuscs in medicine with all their inevitable fruits, a medley of