Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter

Author:Roy Porter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mentally Ill, Psychiatry - History, Mental Illness, Mental Illness - History, Psychiatry, History, Care
ISBN: 9780192802675
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

21 The Florentine physician, Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759-1820) introduced moral treatment into Italy; engraving by de Lasimo, 1804.

In Paris the physician Philippe Pinel pioneered similar psychological approaches at the Bicetre, the main public madhouse for men, and the Salpetriere, its female counterpart. His stress on psychogenic factors rested upon enlightened foundations: empirical observation failed to discern any underlying structural abnormalities in lunatics’ brains when examined post mortem. Moreover, philosophically, Pinel was an idéologue, influenced by Locke’s thinking as radicalized by Condillac. Contrary to Locke, however, his traitement moral was directed to the affective, as opposed to the intellectual, side of the psyche.

Whilst retaining the traditional division of insanity into melancholia, mania, idiocy, and dementia, Pinel also developed new disease categories. His manie sans délire, later called folie raisonnante, outlined a partial insanity: sufferers would be mad on one subject alone. While the understanding remained sound, the personality was warped. Like other moral therapists, Pinel was an optimist: truly organic brain disease might be incurable, but functional disorders like melancholy and ‘mania without delirium’ were responsive to psychological methods. His Medico-philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation or Mania (1801), which set out his thinking on the moral causation and treatment of insanity, was translated into English, Spanish, and German and proved highly influential.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.