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The books came down in two days: Herbert Spencer's First Principles, the Principles of Biology, the Principles of Psychology; Haeckel's History of Evolution; Maudsley's Body and Mind, Physiology and Pathology of Mind, Responsibility in Mental Disease; and Ribot's Heredity. Your instinct told you to read them in that order, controlling personal curiosity.
His Pathology was mythology. A malformed foetus, as the readers of Winthrop's Journal may remember, was enough to scare the colonists from their propriety, and suggest the gravest fears of portended disaster. The student of the seventeenth century opened his Licetus and saw figures of a lion with the head of a woman, and a man with the head of an elephant.
Herbert Spencer's explanations. An internal power necessary, as shown by facts of comparative anatomy. Of teratology. M. St. Hilaire. Professor Burt Wilder. Foot-wings. Facts of pathology. Mr. Dr. William Budd. The existence of such an internal power of individual development diminishes the improbability of an analogous law of specific origination.
Just as the different forms of bodily disease teach us a great deal about the body its degree of strength, its forms of organization and function, its limitations, its heredity, the inter-connection of its parts, etc. so mental diseases teach us much about the normal mind. This gives another sphere of information which constitutes "Abnormal Psychology" or "Mental Pathology."
He also attributes all sorts of disorders to a vicious system of diet. For more than twenty centuries his pathology was the foundation of all the medical sects. He was well acquainted with the medicinal properties of drugs, and was the first to assign three periods to the course of a malady.
There was devoted attention, extreme gentle treatment, study of pathology, advantage of medical attendance always at hand, careful nursing, extreme solicitude, fragility of constitution restored, propriety of enlarging the circle of her innocent affections, ending at last in devoted love, and a proposal to share her carriage and establishment.
Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, "Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?"
In the first case, these perturbations are ranged under the wide and somewhat vague category of "variations"; in the second, they are called lesions, states of poisoning, or diseases; and, as morbid states, they lie within the province of pathology. No sharp line of demarcation can be drawn between the two classes of phenomena.
Indeed, he begins like this: "If Pathology be to disease what Physiology is to health, it appears reasonable to conclude that, in any given structure or organ, the laws of the former will be as fixed and significant as those of the latter: and that the peculiar characters of any structure or organ may be as certainly recognized in the phenomena of disease as in the phenomena of health.
How different is this bit of pathology from the public feeling of Emerson's lines: Spirit that made those heroes dare To die and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee. Rura quae Liris quietâ Mordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis. The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summer of 1879.
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