Leucocytes in acute mania

Abstract

In recent years, the opinion has been gaining ground that mental affections, particularly the acute insanities, like so many of the ordinary physical diseases, are of toxic origin. Macpherson points out that there is no great difference,either in their clinical or pathological aspects, between the delirium so often met with in the acute febrile diseases and the post-febrile insanities which occur occasionally as sequelae to those diseases. The mental state in both these conditions is characterised by confusion, and this is also a prominent feature of that form of acute mania which is called "Confusional Insanity",

In the Morrison lectures of 1905, in classifying insanities, he groups together under the heading of toxic or confusional insanities:

(1) The delirium of the fevers

(2) Alcoholism

(3) Puerperal insanities

(4) Dementia praecox

(5) General Paralysis