proved to be of general applicability. Innumerable cases of extreme idiocy or other intense mental disorders were found to be caused by tumours of the brain. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Wernicke (recently deceased) localised the speech centre in the left temporal lobe. This epoch-making discovery raised hopes to the highest pitch. It was expected that at no distant day every characteristic and every psychical activity would be assigned a place in the cortical grey matter. Gradually, increased attempts were made to trace the primary mental changes in the psychoses back to certain parallel changes in the brain. Meynert, the famous Viennese psychiatrist, described a formal scheme in which the alteration in blood-supply in certain regions was to play the chief part in the origin of the psychoses. Wernicke made a similar but far more ingenious attempt at a morphological explanation of psychical disorders. The visible result of this tendency is seen in the fact that even the smallest and least renowned asylum has, to-day, its anatomical laboratory where cerebral sections are cut, stained, and microscoped. Our numerous psychiatric journals are full of morphological contributions, investigations into the structure and distribution of cells in the cortex, and other varying source of disorders in the different mental diseases.
Psychiatry has come into fame as gross materialism. And quite rightly, for it is on the road—or rather reached it long ago—to put the organ, the instrument, above function. Function has become the dependent accessory of its organs, the mind the dependent accessory of the brain. In modern mental therapy the mind has been the loser, whilst great progress has been made in cerebral anatomy; of the mind we know less than nothing. Current psychiatry behaves like a man who thinks he can unriddle the meaning and importance of a building by a mineralogical investigation of its stones. Let us attempt to realise which mental diseases show obvious changes in the brain, and what is their proportion.
In the last four years we have received 1325 patients at Burgholzi;[1] 331 a year. Of these 9 per cent. suffered from
- ↑ Central Asylum and University Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich.
