A Treatise on Insanity; In Which Are Contained the Principles of a New and More Practical Nosology of Maniacal Disorders Than Has Yet Been Offered T

by Philippe Pinel

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3textit{SECTION L PERIODICAL OK. INlERMIfTENT INSANITY. 1. Nothing can place the slow progress of medical science, in a more striking point of view, than histories of maniacal paroxysms, taken by different persons and at different periods of time. Aretaeus advanced little more upon the subject of intermittent insanity, than that, if well treated, it is capable of being completely cured; but, that the patient is subject to relapses, from various causes, such as errors in regimen, sallies of passion, and the return of spring. Cffilius Aurelianus textit{(b) notices the redness and the fixed direction of the eyes, the distension of the veins, the heightened colour of the cheeks, and the increase of strength, which usually take place in fits of periodical insanity. Those writers, however, give us no instructions with respect to the causes of those (4) Ca-1, Aiueliua. de moib. chronic. Lib. i. Cap. vi. complaints, their peculiar symptoms, their successive periods, their varied forms, their duration, termination and prognosis. It has always been more easy to compile than to observe; to indulge in fruitless theory, than to establish positive facts. Authors, therefore, without number, both ancient and modern, have acquitted themselves in a manner worthy of this inglorious facility, and have been ever writing what their predecessors had written before them. The particular histories, which we meet with in different works, are chiefly remarkable for a few unconnected facts which they detail. The important method of descriptive history has been too much neglected. textit{The great object of the physician and the author has almost uniformly been to recommend a favourite remedy, (c) as if the treatment of every disease, without accurate knowledge of its symptoms, involved in it neither danger nor uncertainty. ...

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

72 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2010

About the author

Philippe Pinel was a French physician, precursor of psychiatry and incidentally a zoologist. He was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy. He worked for the abolition of the shackling of mental patients by chains and, more generally, for the humanisation of their treatment. He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and has been described by some as "the father of modern psychiatry".

After the French Revolution, Dr. Pinel changed the way we look at the crazy (or "aliénés", "alienated" in English) by claiming that they can be understood and cured. An 1809 description of a case that Pinel recorded in the second edition of his textbook on insanity is regarded by some as the earliest evidence for the existence of the form of mental disorder later known as dementia praecox or schizophrenia, although Emil Kraepelin is generally accredited with its first conceptualisation.

"Father of modern psychiatry", he was credited with the first classification of mental illnesses. He had a great influence on psychiatry and the treatment of the alienated in Europe and the United States.

Reviews

[Swavik Dittmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first English edition of a seminal textbook by Pinel on mental disorders. Its second edition has a far superior and more recent translation by Hickish, Healy and Charland, one that I can recommend, unlike this dated translation. Five stars because of its significance.