Foundations of Pyschiatry [Sic]

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: every instance parts of a larger whole. This attitude of medicine towards the tody is perfectly understandable and belongs to a certain stage of progress in the development of thought. The parts are first apprehended before their interrelations can become a matter for consideration. In psychiatry, however,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: every instance parts of a larger whole. This attitude of medicine towards the tody is perfectly understandable and belongs to a certain stage of progress in the development of thought. The parts are first apprehended before their interrelations can become a matter for consideration. In psychiatry, however, the student is for the first time introduced to a consideration of the organism as a whole, to its total as contrasted to its partial reactions. This is not to say that internal medicine can not legitimately consider the organism as a whole, as a unity. It can and should but in psychiatry this matter of unity and wholeness is stressed for the first time. The question no longer is, What is the liver, or the kidney, or the stomach doing ? but, What is the man doing ? This state of affairs can be simply illustrated by a social analogy. Suppose the bakers should get together for the purpose of standardizing the size and the price of a loaf of bread. If the necessary changes to this end were inconsiderable they would not attract attention, would even not be known about by the majority of the people. The changes would be, to all intents and purposes, local, confined to the group of bakers. Such a change is comparable to an inflammation with abscess formation of the arm, for instance, without any systemic symptoms and with a minimum of interference with the function of the arm. Now suppose, on the contrary, that the bakers should agree among themselves to materially raise the price of bread or decrease the size of the loaf, or that they should strike for higher wages and for a time at least stop production. Then it can be readily seen that their action would cease to have only local significance but on the contrary would become of great social importance. To return to the analogy of...