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
Mania
Elevated, expansive or frenzied states; 'mania' in the historical or modern sense.
Works
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
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.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
Passages
- A Treatise on Insanity, Nosology chapters
The divisions of mania, melancholia, dementia, and idiotism show early nineteenth-century diagnostic language before modern mood and psychotic categories.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, hellebore
Black and white hellebore are purgative drugs associated in ancient medicine with melancholia and madness.
- Galen: Selected Works, Commentaries on Hippocratic aphorisms
Galen’s discussions of melancholia, mania and phrenitis transmit Hippocratic categories through humoral explanation.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 14–17
The brain is presented as the organ through which people think, perceive, rejoice, grieve, become mad and suffer terrors.
- Humboldt's Gift, Early sections (Charlie's memories)
Humboldt's torrential talk, grand plans and sleepless energy in the 1940s and 1950s.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Manic-depressive lectures
Recurring excitement and depression are grouped by course rather than isolated symptoms.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, deliberation before killing the children
Medea debates with herself before committing child-murder, showing conflict rather than simple frenzy.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Clinical books
The syndrome descriptions of melancholia, exaltation, monomania, and dementia show German psychiatry before Kraepelin.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 25, hellebore traditions
Hellebore appears in the ancient therapeutic world of purging and treatment of mental disturbance.
- On the Road, Throughout
Marathon drives, all-night jazz clubs and continuous drinking, with sleep deprivation treated as a kind of ecstasy.
- St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Hecker, Strasbourg dancing plague
Crowd dancing is routed toward chapels, masses, musicians, and civic management, a setting relevant to mass psychogenic illness and social stress.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, prologue
Dionysus announces his punitive arrival and the women’s ecstatic departure to the mountain.
- The Republic, Book 9
The tyrannical soul is ruled by lawless desires, dreams and compulsions.
- The Twelve Caesars, Caligula
The biography uses illness, sleeplessness and behavioral excess to frame tyranny as madness or monstrous disorder.
- The Twelve Caesars, Nero
Nero's violence, artistic grandiosity and suicide are presented through bodily fear, performance and death.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“I was not a little surprized to find many maniacs who at no period gave evidence of any lesion of the understanding, but who were under the dominion of instinctive and ab- stract fury”
“I was in an agitation which approached a delirium”
“As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated”
“The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head--that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad”
“Strasburg was visited by the "Dancing Plague" in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there, as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine”
“it is only those in whom the need of excitement is a disease, that feel the tranquillity which follows excitement dull and insipid, instead of pleasurable in direct proportion to the excitement which preceded it”