Principles of Mental Physiology: With their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of its Morbid Conditions

by William Benjamin Carpenter

Overview

William Carpenter (1813–85) was trained as a doctor; he was apprenticed to an eye surgeon, and later attended University College London and the University of Edinburgh, obtaining his M. D. in 1839. Rather than practising medicine, he became a teacher, specialising in neurology, and it was his work as a zoologist on marine invertebrates that brought him wide scientific recognition. His Principles of Mental Physiology, published in 1874, developed the ideas he had first expounded in the 1850s, and expounds the arguments for and against the two models of psychology then current – automatism, which assumed that the mind operates under the control of the physiology of the body for all human activity, and free will, 'an independent power, controlling and directing that activity.' Drawing on animal as well as human examples, his arguments, especially on the acquisition of mental traits in the individual, are much influenced by Darwin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108005289
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/20/2009
Series:	Cambridge Library Collection - History of Medicine
Pages:	764
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.54(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Book I. General Physiology: 1. Of the general relations between mind and body; 2. Of the nervous system and its functions; 3. Of attention; 4. Of sensation; 5. Of perception and instinct; 6. Of ideation and ideo-motor action; 7. Of the emotions; 8. Of habit; 9. Of the will; Book II. Special Physiology: 10. Of memory; 11. Of common sense; 12. Of imagination; 13. Of unconscious cerebration; 14. Of reverie and abstraction–electro-biology; 15. Of sleep, dreaming and somnambulism; 16. Of mesmerism and spiritualism; 17. Of intoxication and delirium; 18. Of insanity; 19. Influence of mental states on the organic functions; 20. Of mind and will in nature; Appendix.