Notes on the Prognosis in Mental Disease
[This paper was intended to have been read at the December Meeting of the Brighton anil Sussex Meclico-Chirurgic.il Society, of which the writer is a member. His aim was to present a brief outline of the data on which the physician basto form his prognosis in cases of mental disease, and he makes here no pretensions to add any new facts to those already familiar to the Psychologist; his object was rather to put together a few observations on this important subject which might interest his professional brethren—members of the society—engaged in the more general practice of medicine, and to serve to raise, during that evening, an interest in the probable results of treatment in his own specialty. Circumstances having arisen to prevent the communication being made in the proposed form, it is here printed in the hope of directing the attention of the members of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane to the many important questions in the general prognosis of mental disease, which their daily practice enables them to observe and to solve with a fulness and accuracy which the writer cannot hope from his own limited experience to have here attained.]