LECTURES ON MENTAL DISEASES. BY W. H. O. SANKEY, M.D. LOND., FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS; LECTURER ON MENTAL DISEASES, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON; PROPRIETOR OF SANDYWELL PARK PRIVATE ASYLUM; PREFACE. THE following Lectures were delivered to the Students of University College, London, during the Session of 1865. They are published in the hope that they may prove acceptable to the profession, and under the conviction that some sort of obligation attaches to one who has enjoyed peculiar privileges for observing a disease. The author, for about ten years, had constantly under his care from six hundred to a thousand insane patients. And considering that the class of affections observed is excluded from general hospitals, and treated only in special establishments, which usually are far removed from the medical schools, and from which the profession is virtually excluded, the obligation becomes, perhaps, the more enhanced. The reader is requested to bear in mind that the Lectures were written for oral delivery, at different periods. He may therefore find more repetitions and recapitulations than a simple continuous treatise would require. Where views have been adopted which have been generally admitted by the best authorities, and have thus become, as it were, incorporated with the literature of the subject, the author has not always given the original authority, for the frequent mention of different names, he feared, would tend to confuse his hearers, |