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Historical origins of schizophrenia: Two early madmen and their illness
Author(s) -
Heinrichs R. Walter
Publication year - 2003
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/jhbs.10152
Subject(s) - schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , mania , mental illness , scholarship , psychiatry , population , depression (economics) , psychology , disease , bipolar disorder , history , psychoanalysis , medicine , mental health , sociology , demography , cognition , political science , pathology , law , economics , macroeconomics
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness with a remarkably short recorded history. Unlike depression andmania, which are recognizable in ancient texts, schizophrenia‐like disorder appeared rather suddenly inthe psychiatric literature of the early nineteenth century. This could mean that the illness is a recent diseasethat was largely unknown in earlier times. But perhaps schizophrenia existed, embedded and disguised within moregeneral concepts of madness and within the arcane languages and cultures of remote times. Both possibilitiespresent major challenges to historical and psychiatric scholarship. These challenges are explored in this paperby presenting two “new” cases of schizophrenia, one from the eighteenth and one from the fourteenthcentury. The cases suggest that the illness may have existed as early as the medieval period. However,establishing the population prevalence of schizophrenia in earlier times—and therefore resolving thepermanence‐recency debate—may not be a feasible enterprise. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.