DISORDERS OF THE MIND

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20961, 15 September 1933, Page 10

DISORDERS OF THE MIND

EDUCATION SOMETIMES | DANGEROUS j j EXCESSIVE SMOKING j BLAMED j ,rTv.z c,r. ov.-s torr.EsroKDEKr.) J LONDON, August 5. Dr. 11. K. C. Rutherford, speaking in the Neurology ancl Psychological Section of the British Medical Association Conference: at Dublin, laid stress on the fact that little attention is paid, to the influence of school life when considering mental disorders. The advance of education and the necessity for receiving and retaining in one's memory a large amount of facts and figures which might (or might not) be useful in a later period imposed one of the most difficult strains to be experienced in life. When it was remembered that at adolescence the brain was immature, and that, although mental illness rmght have been absent up to the school age, yet it was likely that minor disturbances had been present for many years, and perhaps even since birth, and it would not seem a matter for surprise that psychoses occurred frequently at this nerioci. Dr. Rutherford would suggest that there was a danger in what one might term "the excessive education of the unfit," and he would include within it backward children and those who showed any marked evidence of a nervous condition associated with a predisposition to mental illness, even though some of them might be of the brilliant type. They should hasten slowly during this period, and so remove any strain upon the intellect. How often did not one see a hitherto 'brilliant mind become less than mediocre, and make its possessor incapable of self-support! If such young people had been removed early from school and put to work upon the land, many of them might have become useful citizens of the State. "I have known excessive smoking to be the only apparent exciting cause of several cases," Dr. Rutherford added, "and, indeed, I regard it as being a fairly common contributory cause of mental illness. Its effects are not so obvious as those of alcohol, for alcohol, if taken in sufficient quantities, will soon terminate the desire for its continuance by means of the production of an acute psychosis; but in the case of excessive smoking the effects are insidious, with the production of gastric disturbances, loss of appetite, and a generally lowered physical condition, which make a mental attack likely to occur with little other provocation. One contemplates with some alarm the future of a generation yet unborn the mothers of which are harassed with a desire for slimness and excessive smoking. "The experiences of the war proved the extraordinary resistance of the brain to external injury; and, indeed, the highly skilled art of the brain surgeon, for which art I have the greatest respect and admiration, has proved it again and again. He has shaved off portions of the cortex, incised the substance of the brain, probed it, extracted neoplasms from it, and even blown air into it. Notwithstanding all these things, he has .he satisfaction of seeing his patient recover from the anaesthetic with a sane mind. It is only when the cortex is affected widely, usually in some insidious manner by a toxin, that we get symptoms of mental disease."