Daniel Hack Tuke

Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles Daniel Hack Tuke

Book Excerpt: ...titioner, for to no other could such a book as this have had, at that time, much interest. We see, then, a Saxon leech at his studies; the book, in a literary sense, is learned; in a professional view not so, for it does not really advance man's knowledge of disease or of cures. It may have seemed by the solemn elaboration of its diagnoses to do so, but I dare not assert there is real substance in it.... If Bald was at once a physician and a reader of learned books on therapeutics, his example implies a school of medicine among the Saxons. And the volume itself bears out the presumption. We read in two cases that 'Oxa taught this leechdom;' in another, that 'Dun taught it;' in another, 'some teach us;' in another, an impossible prescription being quoted, the author, or possibly Cild, the reedsman, indulges in a little facetious comment, that compliance was not easy."[14]Some light is thrown on the treatment of the insane in early English days by a study of the "Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britai..