Madness: A Brief History Read Online Free PDF Page A

by Seneca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius.
    Through self-knowledge—the Delphic oracle’s ‘know thyself—reason could analyse and explain human nature and thereby master enslaving appetites. Terrified by the titanic and primordial forces disrupting the mind, Platonism, Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, and similar schools of philosophy exposed the irrational as a danger and disgrace which reason or the soul must combat.
    By exalting mind and valuing order and logic, Greek thinkers defined for future ages—even if they did not solve!—the problem of the irrational. In making man the measure of all things, they plucked madness from the heavens and humanized it. They also adduced various schemes for explaining disorders of the mind. So how did the Greeks account for that shipwreck of the soul—and hope to prevent or cure it?
     
    Medicalizing madness
    Complementing the theatrical and philosophical traditions already noted was medicine. Above all, in those texts known as the Hippocratic corpus, purportedly the teachings of Hippocrates of Cos, though in fact rather later, dating largely from the fourth century bc, Greek medicine developed a comprehensive holistic explanatory scheme for health and sickness within which madness was included. Hippocratic medicine aimed to aid Nature in creating and preserving a healthy mind in a healthy body.
    Human life, in sickness and in health, was to be understood in naturalistic terms. As one of those Hippocratic texts tells us,
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absentmindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit.
    Medicine thus excluded the supernatural by definition.
    Hippocratic medicine explained health and illness in terms of ‘humours’ (basic juices or fluids). The body was subject to rhythms of development and change, determined by the key humours constrained within the skin-envelope; health or illness resulted from their shifting balance. These crucial vitality-sustaining juices were blood, choler (or yellow bile), phlegm, and melancholy. They served distinct life-sustaining ends. Bloodwas the source of vitality. Choler or bile was the gastric juice, indispensable for digestion. Phlegm, a broad category comprehending all colourless secretions, was a lubricant and coolant. Visible in substances like sweat and tears, it was most evident when in excess—at times of cold and fever, when it appeared through the mouth and nose. The fourth fluid, black bile, or melancholy, seems more problematic. A dark liquid almost never found pure, it was reckoned responsible for darkening other fluids, as when blood, skin, or stools turned blackish. It was also the cause of dark hair, eyes, or skin pigmentation. Among them, the four major fluids accounted for the visible and tangible phenomena of physical existence: temperature, colour, and texture. Blood made the flesh hot and wet, choler hot and dry, phlegm cold and wet, and black bile produced cold and dry sensations.
    Parallels were drawn with what Aristotle’s philosophy called the ‘elements’ of the universe at large: air, fire, water, earth. Being warm, moist, and animated, blood was like air, while choler was like fire, being warm and dry; phlegm suggested water (cold and wet), and black bile (melancholy) resembled earth (cold and dry). Such analogies further pointed to and meshed with other facets of the natural world, central to Greek science, such as astrological influences and the cycles of  the seasons. Being cold and wet, winter thus had affinities with phlegm; it was the time people