cation. The result
was that the examination of the patients, the study thereof, and even
their treatment, were for the most part often conceived in quite a
different manner. For example, neuroses were studied publicly; the
examination was on elementary sensibilities, the movements of the limbs,
and especially reflexes; the insane were more closely examined in the
mental point of view, in conversations held with them by the physician
alone. Their arguments, their ideas were noted more than their
elementary movements. Strange to say, just when the psycho-therapeutic
treatments by reasoning and moralizing with the patients were being
developed, they stood out the contrary of what one might have
supposed--that this treatment should be applied to neurotic patients
alone. It was admitted that lunatics were probably not able to feel this
moral and rational influence; they were treated by isolation,
shower-baths, and purgatives.

This complete division did not fail to bring about singular and
unfortunate consequences. In a hospital such as La Salpetriere the tic
sufferers, the impulsive, those beset with obsessions, the hysterical
with fits and delirium were placed near the organic hemiplegics and the
tabetics who did not resemble them in the least, and completely
separated from the melancholic, the confused, the systematical raving,
notwithstanding evident analogies. If Charcot who, moreover, has brought
about so much progress in these studies, committed some serious errors
in the interpretation of certain phenomena of hysteria, is it not
greatly due to his having studied these neurotic patients with the
neurology methods without ever applying psychiatry methods? Is it not
strange to refuse psychological treatment precisely to those who present
psychological disorders to the highest degree, and to place the insane
who thinks and suffers altogether outside of psychology?

In fine, this distinction between the neurotic sufferer and the mental
sufferer was mostly arbitrary and depended more than was believed on the
patient's social position and fortune. Important and rich families could
not be resigned to see one of their members blemished by the name of
lunatic, and the physician very often qualified him as neurasthenic to
please the family. A few years ago this distinction of the patients and
of the physicians gave rise to a very amusing controversy in the
newspapers. The professor of the clinic for diseases of the nervous
sy