A Memoir of John Conolly Author:James Clark Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VII. his clinical lectures, and on other occasions, Dr. Conolly was in the habit of pointing out the assistance afforded by phrenology in the diagnosis and tr... more »eatment of lunacy. In his Indications of Insanity, for instance, when commenting on a case in which the perceptive faculties and physical energy were active, while the reflective faculties had not sufficient controlling power, he expresses his opinion in the following terms:— " This is not the only variety of character of which it may occur to some of my readers, that the phrenological system affords the best apparent explanation. The facts alluded to in the text, many of the phenomena of disease, and the observation of all mankind, seem to me to prove that the first principles of phrenology are founded in nature. On these it is very probable that many fancies and errors may have been built; but now that anatomy and physiology have together penetrated so far into the separateness of the structure and functions of the nerves of the spinal marrow, and even of certain portions of the cerebral mass, I can see nothing which merits the praise of being philosophical, in the real or affected contempt professed by so many anatomists and physiologists, for a science which, how- PHRENOLOGY. 67 ever imperfect, has for its object the demonstration that, for other functions the existence of which none can deny, there are further separations and distinctions of hitherto unexplained portions of nervous matter. At a later period, in one of the Lectures on Mental Disease, which he delivered in the Eoyal Institution, he ,ve the following rational view of phrenology:— "Although the doctrines of phrenology have met with little favour, and the pretensions of recent professors of occult methods of acting upon the nervous system, have...« less