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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![After Galen everything fell into obscurity and confusion. Alexander of Tralles (A. D. 560) and Paul of Egina (A. D. 630) brought out nothing new in regard to insanity, and as to the Arab physicians Avecenna, Rhazes (10th century) they confined them- selves to developing the ideas of Galen as to insanity by consensus, the seat of which they placed in different viscera, and especially in the liver and spleen. THIRD EPOCH. {Epoch of transition). 1. The Middle Ages. During the whole duration of the middle ages the study of insanity lost itself in the general chaos and no traces of it were to be found. The belief in demons dominated all imaginations; superstition spread itself in all paits; it was the reign of sorcery, of the Avitches' Sabbath, of demonopathy, of lycan- thropy and of demoniac ])ossession. Thus occurred in all parts, those terrible opidc'm- ics of hysterical religious insanity, the detailed his- tory of which Calmeil has preserved, all of which, after a series of exorcisms, and of more or less sol- emn mystical ceremonies, ended in the condemnation of the unfortunate insane and tlieir punishment by torture or execution. Thousands of unhapi)y beings, victims of popular prejudice, atoned with their lives for their loss of reason and became the prey of the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21963009_0036.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
