The new phrase, dementia praecox, was quite precise. By the time Davidian employed it as a diagnosis it had been current for twenty years. It literally meant early-flowering failure of the mental powers, and was used to distinguish a condition in which a person begins to lose touch with reality, as Minor had done, early on his life—in his teens, his twenties, or his thirties. In this sense the illness was markedly different from senile dementia, a term once used to describe the decrepitude that specifically accompanies old age, and of which Alzheimer’s disease is one kind.
Needless to say, this was the earlier terminology for schizophrenia, which affects 1% of the human population.
