Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Medical tag
Bloodletting
Phlebotomy, leeches, cupping, purging as therapy.
Works
Al-Razi's treatise, known in Arabic as Kitab al-Judari wa al-Hasba (The Book of Smallpox and Measles), is a short practical monograph in fourteen chapters by the leading physician of the Abbasid world. It is usually described as the earliest surviving work devoted to these diseases and the first to set out clearly how to tell them apart at the bedside.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Essays: First Series gathers twelve essays that Emerson worked up from his journals and from the lecture courses he gave in Boston in the late 1830s. Each pursues one idea through a rush of aphorisms, examples and images rather than a step-by-step argument, and together they set out his conviction that the same universal mind or soul speaks in every person and in nature.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals is the short Latin treatise, printed at Frankfurt in 1628, in which William Harvey argued that the blood moves continuously in a circuit, driven out by the heart through the arteries and returned to it by the veins. The library text is Robert Willis's English translation of 1847, as revised by Alexander Bowie and reprinted in 1910 in the Harvard Classics, with that series' introductory note on Harvey's life.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Collar is a 36-line lyric from George Herbert's The Temple, the book of religious poems published in 1633, a few months after his death. Its speaker, a man bound to God's service and often read as a priest like Herbert himself, rises in revolt against that service.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.
Passages
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter V
Preventive bloodletting for those over fourteen, cupping for younger children, cool rooms and a cooling diet.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Joe Green gives the overheated Beauty cold water and no blanket; Beauty falls seriously ill and is treated by the horse doctor and nursed by John.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Divisions of the Philosophic Sciences (Physics; Moral Philosophy)
Medicine as the study of the body's organs and their changes; the honey in the surgeon's cupping glass.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Harvey credited with circulation; evidence from surgeons who tie the arm above the vein they open in bloodletting.
- Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays), II. Self-Reliance, early paragraphs on nonconformity
Emerson says he wants his life to be sound and sweet and not to need diet and bleeding, using the period's standard remedies as a figure for a life propped up from outside.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Final illness correspondence and accounts
Washington's death after severe throat illness and bloodletting reflects eighteenth-century medical practice.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Treatment sections
Recommended bleeding, purging, restraint, and moral management raise major ethical issues.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 9
A man faints at gushing blood, another at bloodletting; a man saws his own leg; a dropsy case relieved by a wound to the abdomen.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Chs. XI–XII
Tight and medium ligatures on the arm, as used in bloodletting, show arterial inflow and venous return; the fainting patient whose blood only drips is explained.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 5, Memb. 1, Subs. 2 and 6
Bloodletting for melancholy; correctors of insomnia and fearful dreams using poppy, mandrake, henbane, nightshade, hemp-seed and opiates.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 4, paras. 920-922 and 934-975
General rules of treatment, the relief of pain with white poppy, joy as an aid to cure, and the indications for bloodletting, purging and emesis.
- The Collar, Lines 7-9
The harvest of thorns that lets blood without restoring anything, set against cordial fruit.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book IV, Chapter xiv
A surgeon arrives after Tom saves Sophia, advises that she be blooded after her fall, and sets Tom's broken arm.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book VII, Chapter xiii, and Book VIII, Chapter iii
The inn surgeon treats Tom's head wound with jargon and phlebotomy and quarrels when the patient refuses to be blooded again.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 2
The Diafoiruses visit; young Thomas Diafoirus boasts of rejecting the circulation of the blood; the doctors examine Argan.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapters XLVII–XLIX
Helen's letters report Huntingdon's hunting injury, his half-delirium and thirst, the doctor's order to bleed him, his relapse into wine, the onset of mortification, and his death.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV, Discourse LXIV: The Leech
A scientist lies in a swamp letting leeches bleed his arm to study the leech's brain; Zarathustra calls him a 'cupping-glass' of conscience and offers to tend his wounds.
- Washington: A Life, Final chapter (December 1799)
The throat infection, the physicians' repeated bleeding and other remedies, and Washington's composed death.
Quotes
“Honey does not become impure because it may happen to have been placed in the glass which the surgeon uses for cupping purposes.”
“I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject”
“Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me bloud, and not restore What I have lost with cordiall fruit?”
“How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me”