Before Psychiatry

Abstract

This chapter explores the three major conceptions of mental illness—supernatural, biological, and psychological—that developed among the ancient Greeks and that formed the major templates for madness that have continually resurfaced in Western thought through the present. During the long period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the European Renaissance and Reformation, physicians became subordinate to theologians and medical thought itself languished. Nevertheless, the Hippocratic psychiatric corpus remained virtually undisturbed. The chapter then considers views of madness that developed in the 16th century in the works of Robert Burton, Richard Napier, and William Shakespeare. Finally, it turns to how mental illness became increasingly likely to be viewed within medical, as opposed to spiritual or moral, frameworks over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Within medicine, the influence of humoral pathology, which had dominated medical thinking since ancient times, gradually waned as mechanistic notions grounded in nerves, fibers, and organs arose.