We are at the beginning of a new era in the pathogenesis and treatment of the neural diseases. The discovery of the neuron has resulted in making clear some of the dark passages in physiology and pathogenesis, and the dynamic changes produced in these neurons by alcohol and other extrinsic poisons, that have been so marvelously demonstrated by Andriezen, Van Gieson and others, and the reasonable inference that intrinsic poisons are equally powerful in establishing pathologic conditions, open up a new line of important therapeutic investigation.
The primary form of the psychoses from the beginning has been called melancholia, "black bile," because of the relation ever recognized between mental depression and perverted action of the great viscus of the abdominal cavity, and in more modern times quaint old Abernethy emphasized the same etiologic thought when he gave utterance to the aphorism that the best medicine for the "blues" is the