Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XVI PRESENILE, ARTERIOSCLEROTIC AND SENILE DISORDERS OF THE BRAIN AND CORD By ALBERT MOORE BARRETT, M.D. In this chapter will be considered the treatment of certain mental and nervous disorders whose occurrence is intimately dependent upon the regressive changes which involve the central nervous system as a part of the process of aging. The year of life at which the physical and nervous structures begin to undergo involutionary changes is subject to considerable individual variation, and any attempt to fix an age at which one becomes senile must be more or less arbitrary. For clinical convenience it has become customary to recognize a senile period of life, the beginning of which in the majority of instances Naunyn places at about the age of sixtyfive, when in most men the ensemble of the evidences of aging have become manifested, and a presenile period which stands between late adult life and the beginning of senility. The influence of age in the production of mental disorders has been well recognized and a group of senile psychoses has long been a part of all clinical classifications of mental disorders. As clinical and pathological experience has developed it has been found that while arteriosclerotic changes in the brain are commonly associated with the process of a senile psychosis, they sometimes are so characteristically independent of the process of aging as to justify the establishment of a special group of arteriosclerotic mental disorders. The position of the presenile mental disorders is less clear. The conception of these clinical forms has been developed in the text-books of Kraepelin, and includes a variety of clinical syndromes which cannot satisfactorily be placed among other circumscribed clinical groups and...
