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Melancholia and partial insanity
Author(s) -
Jackson Stanley W.
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/1520-6696(198304)19:2<173::aid-jhbs2300190206>3.0.co;2-6
Subject(s) - melancholia , insanity , psychoanalysis , habitus , psychology , derangement , history , psychiatry , archaeology , cognition , mathematics , combinatorics , ethnography
In the medical literature of the eighteenth century melancholia came to be defined as partial insanity. Seventeenth‐century English law introduced the term and influenced later forensic concerns about the concept. But the history of melancholia reveals a gradual development of such a concept of limited derangement associated with the delusions usually cited in accounts of this disease. In the early nineteenth century the relationship of melancholia and this concept weakened and was gradually abandoned, the content of the syndrome of melancholia was reduced, and out of this complex process emerged the notion of monomania.