Page:Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind - Benjamin Rush.djvu/12



to a promise made to the public some years ago, and in compliance with the solicitations of the author's pupils, he now offers to them a volume of Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind.

The views which he has taken of the proximate cause, forms, and symptoms of those diseases, have obliged him to employ a new nomenclature to designate some of them. This becomes no less necessary where new opinions are proposed, or new symptoms described in the history of diseases, than an increase in the number of words, and new combinations of them, become necessary to accompany the increase of the wants and objects of civilized society.

Some of the facts contained in the following pages are of an old date, and will be familiar to the medical reader, but the publication of them, it is hoped, will be excused, when it is perceived, that they are placed under the direction of new principles, and that new inferences of a practical nature are deduced from them. An apology may seem necessary likewise for the large number of recent facts that have been added to them. Upon subjects so interesting as the present, more than common testimony is necessary to produce conviction. Besides, facts, or precedents, have the same effects in reasoning in medicine, that examples have in morals. They compel the reader to admit the practice they are intended to establish, provided they are applied in a proper manner.