L601 C67 1883 PREFACE. ANOTHER book on Mental Disease almost needs an apology, the treatises on the subject of late years having been so numerous, and some of them so good. But the subject has never yet, in the opinion of many, been treated from so entirely clinical and practical a point of view as is desired by students of medicine, and by busy practitioners. The strong point of a clinical lecture should be that it appeals directly and on all occasions to the facts of disease as seen in actual cases, following the lines of the cases on which it is founded. It must have its foundation in the clinical experience of its author, this giving it vividness and interest. Its weak points are, that the diseases are not treated in full, systematic, and generalised way, that the history of investigation into them cannot be entered into, and therefore great seeming injustice is done to previous authors and investigators. I have been much impressed in teaching students by the fact that you can manifestly interest every member of a large class when you are teaching mental diseases clinically, while you fail to reach some of them by systematic descriptions. Direct appeals to the facts of nature, however fragmentary, make more impression on them than any amount of elaborate description. These considerations led me to publish the following lectures as a text-book for my students in the University of Edinburgh; and I venture to indulge the hope that it will also |