The Distinction Between Mental And Physical Illness
Conditions that now would be regarded as ‘mental illnesses’, such as mania, melancholia and hysteria, have figured in classifications of disease since the time of Hippocrates, and for over 2000 years were treated by physicians with much the same range of potions, medicaments and attempts to correct humoral imbalance as they employed for other more obviously medical disorders. Although Plato attributed some forms of madness to the Gods, and meduieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas attributed hallucinations and insanity to demons and other supernatural influences, from the Renaissance to the second half of the 18th century melancholia and other forms of insanity were generally regarded as bodily illnesses, not differing in any fundamental way from other diseases. When the mid-18th century belle lettriste Lady Mary Wortley Montagu commented that “madness is as much a corporeal distemper as the gout or asthma”, ...