'Brain Disorders', by Henry Calderwood (1879).
History of Psychiatry June 1, 2018 DOI: 10.1177/0957154x17745435 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Brain Calderwood Ferrier Szasz Mind |
| Key points | Argues that Henry Calderwood's 1879 work provides a detailed analysis of contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry, concluding that their findings had very limited explanatory power for understanding madness, and that his contribution deserves recognition in the history of the philosophy of psychiatry. |
Abstract
Henry Calderwood, a nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher interested in madness, published in 1879 an important work on the interaction between philosophy of mind, the nascent neurosciences and mental disease. Holding a spiritual view of the mind, he considered the phrase 'mental disease' (as Feuchtersleben had in 1845) to be but a misleading metaphor. His analysis of the research work of Ferrier, Clouston, Crichton-Browne, Maudsley, Tuke, Sankey, etc., is detailed, and his views are correct on the very limited explanatory power that their findings had for the understanding of madness. Calderwood's conceptual contribution deserves to be added to the growing list of nineteenth-century writers who started the construction of a veritable 'philosophy of alienism' (now called 'philosophy of psychiatry').