categories of so-called disease entities as natural kinds. Just as botanists had shown that, based on their natural properties, pine trees were similar to each other and different from elm trees, psychiatrists, doctors, and other clinicians hoped to reveal the exact nature of mental disorders, and to differentiate between their distinct natural kinds in the clearest of terms. Unlike some of the earlier views of mental disorders, which saw the body and mind as constantly oscillating between health and illness, and considered health as a form of humoral and moral equilibrium, the mainstream view of alienists in the nineteenth century was that mental disorders were completely different in kind from normal mental states.
Nineteenth-century European medicine, with its laboratories and hospitals, supported the notion that diseases are specific, objective, physical entities that exist outside their unique manifestation in a particular human being.103 Regardless of the place or person in which they are located, disease entities were believed to have typical symptoms, to follow specific courses, produce particular outcomes, and obey an underlying biological mechanism. These disease units were viewed not only as different from health, but also as having clear boundaries that separated them from one another. It is in the framework of this episteme, to cite Michel Foucault’s well-known term, that we see a general shift from “dis-ease” to diseases and from “mal-aise” (a state of discomfort) to malaise (an illness).104 It is in the wake of this transformation of “dis-ease,” experienced as discomfort, into a disease, seen as an externally diagnosed separate entity, that the downright pessimistic diagnosis of dementia praecox, with its grim prognosis, and in its wake that of schizophrenia, came into being.
Notes
1 1. We use the term “patient” as it connotes pati or suffering.
2 2. Roy Porter, “The patient’s view: Doing medical history from below,” Theory and Society 14, 2 (1985): 175–98.
3 3. Mark Ellerby, “Schizophrenia: Stigma and the impact of literature,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 44, 3 (2018): 466–7.
4 4. Emil Kraepelin, Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia, trans. R. Mary Barclay; ed. George M. Robertson (New York: Krieger Publishing, 1971 [1919]), 242.
5 5. Susan Weiner, “The details in schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 44, 4 (2018): 707–9.
6 6. Ibid.
7 7. Ibid.
8 8. Ibid.
9 9. See Tanya M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow (eds.) Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016).
10 10. See John Weir Perry, The Far Side of Madness (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974).
11 11. D. V. Jeste, R. Carman, J. B. Lohr, and R. J. Wyatt, “Did schizophrenia exist before the eighteenth century?,” Comprehensive Psychiatry, 26 (1985): 493–503, 502.
12 12. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965), 254.
13 13. Madalina Vârtejanu-Joubert, “Representations of madmen and madness in Jewish sources from the pre-exilic to the Roman-Byzantine period,” in G. Eghigian (ed.), The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health (New York: Routledge, 2017), 38. See also Madalina Vârtejanu-Joubert, Folie et société dans l’Israël antique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).
14 14. Deuteronomy 28:28.
15 15. Vârtejanu-Joubert, “Representations of madmen,” 20.
16 16. Daniel 4:33.
17 17. Mark 5:2–9.
18 18. Mark 5:9.
19 19. Mark 5:15.
20 20. Samuel, 14:12.
21 21. George Rosen, Madness in Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 11.
22 22. Karl Jaspers, “Der Prophet Ezechiel, Eine pathographische Studie,” in Arbeiten zur Psychiatrie, Neurologie und ihre Grenzgebieten: Festschrift für Kurt Schneider (Heidelberg: Verlag Scherer, 1947), 77–85. See also George Stein, “The voices that Ezekiel hears – Psychiatry in the Old Testament,” British Journal of Psychiatry 196, 2 (2010): 101.
23 23. Samuel 14:10.
24 24. Samuel 10:9.
25 25. Daniel 4:16.
26 26. Isaiah 28:21.
27 27. Vârtejanu-Joubert, “Representations of madmen,” 29.
28 28. Hagiga 3b, quoted in Vârtejanu-Joubert, “Representations of madmen,” 34.
29 29. Vârtejanu-Joubert, “Representations of madmen,” 34.
30 30. Caelius Aurelianus, On Acute Diseases and on Chronic Diseases, trans. I. E. Drabkin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1950).
31 31. Plato, Phaedrus, 265b2–6.
32 32. Phaedrus, 244b6–7.
33 33. Plato, Laws, XI, 934c7, trans. T. L. Pangle (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 337.
34 34. Chiara Thumiger, “Ancient Greek and Roman traditions,” in The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, 42–61.
35 35. Hysteria in Virgins, quoted in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant (eds.), Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation, 3rd edn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 243.
36 36. Ibid.
37 37. Ibid., 242.
38 38. Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease, Loeb Classical Library, Vol II, trans. W. H. S. Jones, P. Potter, W. D. Smith and E. T. Withington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923).
39 39. Ibid., 175
40 40. Thumiger, “Ancient Greek and Roman traditions,” 48.
41 41. Ibid.
42 42. The Sacred Disease, 177.
43 43. Ibid.
44 44. Ibid.
45 45. Celsus, De Medicina, III, 18. See Celsus, On Medicine, Vol. III: Books 7–8, trans. W. G. Spencer. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 336.
46 46. Thumiger, “Ancient Greek and Roman traditions,” 51.
47 47. Ibid., 52.
48 48. Galen, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul, trans. P. Harkins (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1963).
49 49. Ibid., 43.
50 50. Ibid., 46–7.
51 51. Ibid., 46. In Plato’s metaphor of the tripartite soul, the charioteer drives a pair of winged horses, one of which is noble and good (the spirited part) while the other is the opposite (the appetitive part).
52 52. Although the origin of the six non-naturals
