Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Medical tag
Bloodletting
Phlebotomy, leeches, cupping, purging as therapy.
Works
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Passages
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Joe Green gives the overheated Beauty cold water and no blanket; Beauty falls seriously ill and is treated by the horse doctor and nursed by John.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Harvey credited with circulation; evidence from surgeons who tie the arm above the vein they open in bloodletting.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Final illness correspondence and accounts
Washington's death after severe throat illness and bloodletting reflects eighteenth-century medical practice.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Treatment sections
Recommended bleeding, purging, restraint, and moral management raise major ethical issues.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 5, Memb. 1, Subs. 2 and 6
Bloodletting for melancholy; correctors of insomnia and fearful dreams using poppy, mandrake, henbane, nightshade, hemp-seed and opiates.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 2
The Diafoiruses visit; young Thomas Diafoirus boasts of rejecting the circulation of the blood; the doctors examine Argan.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV, Discourse LXIV: The Leech
A scientist lies in a swamp letting leeches bleed his arm to study the leech's brain; Zarathustra calls him a 'cupping-glass' of conscience and offers to tend his wounds.
Quotes
“I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject”
“How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me”