ADHD - An Illustrated historical overview

V aluable observations in the 19 th century were also made by the famous French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) and by the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), who in his book The physiology and pathology of the mind (1867) described a child “driven by an impulse of which it can give no account, to a destructive act, the real nature of which it does not appreciate: a natural instinct is exaggerated and perverted by disorder of the nerve centre, and the character of its morbid manifestation is often determined by accidents of external circumstances.” "The insane, no longer enjoy the faculty of fixing, and directing their attention, and this priva- tion is the primitive cause of all their errors. We observe this among children, who, although very impressible, have nevertheless few sensations, for want of attention." Esquirol, 1845, p. 28f.