A practical manual of mental medicine / by E. Régis ; with a preface by M. Benjamin Ball ; authorised translation by H.M. Bannister.
- Date:
- 1895
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A practical manual of mental medicine / by E. Régis ; with a preface by M. Benjamin Ball ; authorised translation by H.M. Bannister. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![claimed descent from yEscidapiiiH and i)ossessed, as we have seen, the monopoly of the treatTiient of the insane in ancient Greece. He was born, as is well known, in tiie island of Cos, 460 B. C. Although he wrote no special treat- ise on mental alienation, it is easy to perceive from an attentive perusal of his writings, that he had a tolerably accurate knowledge of this class of dis- orders. Even before him some distinctions had been made, as he appears to have borrowed from tradition the terms he employed of phrenitis, mmiio, nu'lnn- choliii and .sacred disease. Plippocrates describes phren'ttis according to its etymology, together with pleuritis and pneumonia, and locates its seat in the phrenic center. It con- sists, according to him, in a continuous delirium in an acute fever. Its cause is the heating of the whole body by the blood, itself over-heated by mix- ture with the bile which displaced it and changed it to serum, affected its movement and its habitual con- stitution. As to the symptoms, they are fully indi- cated in the following formula, as succinct as accurate, which is taken from the treatise on e]tidemic affec- tions : Acute delirium Avith high fever, carjihologia, small and wiry pulse. The disease, the duration of which varied between the extreme limits of three aiul one hundred and twenty days, ended in dejitli more often than in recovery. Although it is difficult to say exactly what Hippo- crates and other ancient writers understood by](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21963009_0026.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
