‘Brain Disorders’, by Henry Calderwood (1879)

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’).