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Page 25
DR. JANET
Mr. President, my dear colleagues, ladies, and gentlemen: The Americans
and the French have met on the battle-fields and they have faced
together the same sufferings for the defense of their common ideal of
civilization and liberty; it is right that they should meet likewise
where Science stands up for the protection of health and human reason,
and that they should celebrate together the Festivals of Peace. The
President and the organizers of this Congress have greatly honored me in
asking me to represent France at the celebration of the centenary of the
Bloomingdale Hospital; but above all they have procured me a great
pleasure in offering me the opportunity of coming again to this
beautiful land, of meeting once more friends who had welcomed us kindly
in former days; our old friends of past happy days who have become still
dearer to us since they have been tried during the bad days.
Allow me, in the first place, to present you with the best wishes of the
French Government who have had the kindness to charge me to interpret
the sentiments of sympathy which they feel for all manifestations
tending to render the relations that unite our two countries closer and
more fruitful. The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences has equally
charged me to assure you that it is happy to be represented by one of
its members at the commemoration of the centenary of Bloomingdale
Hospital that has so brilliantly and generously continued the tradition
of Pinel and Esquirol. The Academy takes a lively interest in the
psychological and moral studies of this Congress that seek the cure of
diseases of the mind and the lessening of mental disorders. The
Medico-Psychological Society, the Society of Neurology, the Society of
Psychology, the Society of Psychiatry of Paris are happy to take part in
these festivals and are desirous of associating still more closely their
work to that of the scientific societies of the United States.
The celebration of the centenary of a lunatic asylum gives birth to-day
to a national festivity in which all civilized nations participate. This
is a fact that would have well astonished the first founders of lunatic
asylums, the Pinels, the Esquirols, the William Tukes, and the first
organizers of Bloomingdale. The public opinion respecting the diseases
of the mind, the care to be given to lunatics, is vastly different to
what it was a century ago. This transformation of ideas has taken place,
in a great measure, as a result of the studies devoted to neuroses and
that is why it seems to me interesting to present you to-day with a few
reflections on the connections which unite neuroses and psychoses; for
it is the discovery of these connections that has shown to the man sound
in mind, or who imagines himself to be so, how near he always was to
being a lunatic and how wise it was always to consider the lunatic as a
brother.
Formerly a lunatic was considered as a separate being, quite apart from
other members of society. The old prejudices which banished the patient
from the tribe as a useless and dangerous individual had diminished no
doubt with respect to the diseases of the body, which were more and more
regarded as frequent and natural things to which each of us might be
exposed. But these prejudices persisted with respect to some sexual
diseases that were still considered ignominious and chiefly with respect
to diseases of the mind. No doubt some intelligent and charitable
physicians took interest in the lunatic, endeavored to spare him many
sufferings, to defend him, to take care of him. But the people feared
the lunatic and despised him as if he had been struck by some
malediction which excommunicated him. I have seen lately a patient's
parents upset with emotion, as they had to cross the gardens of the
asylum to visit their daughter, at the single thought that they might
catch sight of a lunatic. This individual, in fact, had lost in the eyes
of the public the particular quality of man, reason, which, it appears,
distinguishes us from beasts; he seemed still living, but he was morally
dead; he was no longer a man.
No doubt it was a dreadful misfortune when some member of a family
became insane, but this terrible calamity, which nothing could make one
anticipate or avoid, was happily exceptional, like thunderbolts. The
other men and even the members of the family presented nothing similar
and regarded themselves with pride as very different to this wretched
being transformed into a beast. This victim of heavenly curse was
pitied, settled comfortably in a nice pavilion at Bloomingdale and never
more spoken of. People still preserve on this point ideas similar to
those they had formerly about tuberculosis, known only under the form of
terrible but exceptional pulmonary consumption. Now it has at last been
understood that there are slight tuberculoses, curable, but tremendously
frequent. It will be the same with mental disorders; one day it will be
recognized that under diverse forms, more or less attenuated they exist
to-day on all sides, among a crowd of individuals that one does not feel
inclined to consider as insane.
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