Mental Disorders In The Classical World

Mental Disorders in the Classical World seeks to show through interdisciplinary work how the first medical scientists and their lay contemporaries conceptualized mental disorders and attempted to diagnose, understand and treat them.

Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: From Celsus to Paul of Aegina traces the history of conceptions of mental disorder in Graeco-Roman medical writings, from the 1st century BCE to the 7th CE, with detailed studies of all significant authors.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the views of ancient philosophers on mental disorders. Relying on the original Greek and Latin textual sources, the author describes and analyses how the ancient philosophers explained mental illness and its symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, strange fears and inappropriate moods and how they accounted for the respective roles of body and mind in such disorders. Also considered are ethical questions relating to mental illness, approaches to treatment and the position of mentally ill people in societies of the times. The volume opens with a historical overview that examines ancient medical accounts of mental illness, from Hippocrates' famous Sacred Disease to late antiquity medical authors. Separate chapters interpret in detail the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Galen and the Stoics and a final chapter summarises the views of various strains of Scepticism, the Epicurean school and the Middle and Neo-Platonists. Offering an important and useful contribution to the study of ancient philosophy, psychology and medicine. This volume sheds new light on the history of mental illness and presents a new angle on ancient philosophical psychology.

The first substantial history of psychological thought in Classical Greek medicine, showing the relevance of ancient ideas to modern debates.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: From Celsus to Paul of Aegina traces the history of conceptions of mental disorder in Graeco-Roman medical writings, from the 1st century BCE to the 7th CE, with detailed studies of all significant authors.

"Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Homer to Neuroscience traces the extensive array of answers that various groups have provided to questions about the nature of mental illness and its boundaries with sanity. What distinguishes mental illnesses from other sorts of devalued conditions and from normality? Should medical, religious, psychological, legal, or no authority at all respond to the mentally ill? Why do some people become mad? What treatments might help them recover? Despite general agreement across societies regarding definitions about the pole of madness, huge disparities exist on where dividing lines should be placed between it and sanity and even if there is any clear demarcation at all. Various groups have provided answers to these puzzles that are both widely divergent and surprisingly similar to current understandings"--