RATIONALE OF TREATMENT OF TOXIC AND INFECTION PSYCHOSES

Abstract

The clinical interpretation of toxic and exhaustion psychoses rests, primarily, on psychobiologic principles. Of these principles, the modern physiologic concept that living things are transformers, rather than generators of matter and energy, gives us understanding of the term mechanism when applied in conservation of energy, on which concept treatment must be founded. The neural mechanisms with their baffling complexities, their problems of functioning, their clinical interpretations, etc., all require familiarity with the physiology of nervous reactions and afford the most inviting field for the research worker today, especially when in this great world's war, the clinical problems in this special field are overwhelming both in intricacy and in numbers. We must, in our approach to the understanding of these problems, keep in mind the three essential points of Sherrington,1as regards nervous reactions, namely, first, the natural history of cell life; second, the conduction of the nervous impulse more