Practical manual of mental medicine / with a preface by M. Benjamin Ball. Authorized translation by H. M. Bannister. With introduction by the author.
- Emmanuel Régis
- Date:
- 1894
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Practical manual of mental medicine / with a preface by M. Benjamin Ball. Authorized translation by H. M. Bannister. With introduction by the author. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
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![oguizing the pathological nature of insanity. With the most praiseworthy persistence he combated the medico-religious practices of the Asclepiades in order to substitute for them a more rational and medical treatment. From that time the ablutions, exorcisms and incantations were succeeded by phle- botomy, purgation, emetics, baths, vegetable diet, hygienic exercises, music, traveling, in a word by all the medical appliances available at that epoch. It was he who regulated the use of hellebore (Veratrum album) employed enipiricall^^ from a very high antiquity as a specific for insanity, and he had his patients go and collect it themselves at Anticyra, a little village in Thessaly, where was found the variety in most repute. Hippocrates ap- pears to have likewise employed mandragora, as a special drug, in cases of suicidal melancholia. As to how they managed the insane, whether or not there existed especial establishments for their care, and whether restraint or coercion was em- ployed in severe and difficult cases, we are unfortu- nately left only to conjecture. It seems probable that quiet and inoffensive patients were left at liberty or, at least, in their homes under the surveil- lance of their servants or relatives, and that certain cases were cared for in asylums {Idrpio)^ as ap])ears to be the case from a passage in Plutarch relative to Antiphon, a |»hysician at Corinth. Moreover, a history of a lunatic related by Herodotus leads us to suppose that very rigorous methods of restraint](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21209819_0032.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
