270 PSYCHIATRY 



examine the mutual relations of the biological sciences to know 

 their relative value to psychiatry. 



The Position of Pathology and its Influence upon Modern Psychiatry 



The science of pathology, with the justification of its brilliant 

 achievements, holds itself to be fundamental to the medical sciences. 

 Its elucidation of the phenomena of disease and its results puts it 

 into inseparable relation with life. It claims that its conceptions 

 comprehend all of biology, for on all sides it bears essential relations 

 to the subsidiary biological sciences. Deviations from normal struc- 

 ture and composition of the body, and from the normal functions of 

 its parts, are held to belong to pathology; in this view the study 

 of structural variations in the evolutional and the developmental 

 processes from the normal in primordial and embryonal forms may 

 explain inherited and congenital disease, and, as a part of pathology, 

 throw light upon morphology. Physics and chemistry, as they under- 

 lie both function and structure, contribute to the explanation of 

 pathological change, and the disorders of function caused by disease; 

 and pathological physiology and chemistry, whose importance is 

 now receiving growing recognition, are to be regarded as subsidiary 

 to pathology and dependent upon it. In the sphere of general patho- 

 logy, dealing with function, it finds its duty to be "to correlate 

 symptoms with structural changes and trace the connection between 

 them." 



The science of pathology, presenting by its salient aspects such 

 claims to the physician who seeks for light upon the problems of 

 psychiatry, reveals a changing history. The leadership of the patho- 

 logical-anatomical school in France passing over to Germany cul- 

 minated in the "cellular pathology" of Virchow, this being founded 

 upon the principle that the cell is the unit of structure and function 

 and that all vital processes are to be referred to the activity of the 

 cells of which the body is composed; they are the "factors of exist- 

 ence." This includes the phenomena of disease and all alterations 

 of the organs and tissues, the principle being that whatever acts 

 upon the cell from without produces a change, either chemical or 

 physical, in the cell structure, and disease is constituted of such 

 changes. These principles became the foundation of the "exact 

 medicine" of the present day. Griesinger first established modern 

 psychiatry upon the exact basis of scientific research and patho- 

 logical principles, and through Meynert pathological-anatomical 

 teachings were greatly advanced; following them it was in such 

 an environment that the latest schools of psychiatry had their be- 

 ginnings with an immediate inheritance of its morphological con- 

 ceptions as the fundamental criteria of scientific truth. Such were 





