On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females

As the title of this book implies, I do not intend to occupy the attention of my readers with all the numerous varieties of insanity and other nervous disorders to which females are liable, but only those which I believe to be curable by surgical means; nor is it my intention in this category to include slight cases, but to confine myself to such as cause more or less severe functional derangement, or which lead to serious organic lesions.

The class of diseases on which I shall dwell are those depending on (or arising from) a loss of nerve tone, caused by continual abnormal irritation of a nerve centre.

This is no very new theory; but it has been for Dr. Handheld Jones, by a large number of cases and experiments, as collated in his admirable work on “Functional Nervous Disorders,” to make it “abundantly clear that the great majority of disorders we have to treat at the present time show more or less marked indications of failure of nervous power.” Dr. Jones confines himself “to such disorders as are termed functional;” and I agree with him that “it seems a vain dispute, whether in strict accuracy there are, or are not, any such disorders; ... for it is perfectly certain that there are very grave disorders in which the most careful scrutiny fails to detect any actual change, in which complete recovery is perfectly possible, and in which the ‘juvantia’ are such as to operate more in modifying the power of the organs than the texture.” Dr. Jones then gives two typical cases of functional and organic disease, between which, as he justly observes, “there intervene numerous instances of more or less mixed character;” and adds, that “disease which commences essentially as functional may end as organic.”