HLTHAGE 2G03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Bloodletting, Moral Treatment, The Retreat
30 Jan 2017
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Lecture 3 from madness to mental illness. Madness is not a medical term: spiritual, not biological/scientific. Medical illness is a medical term: handled by physicians, nurses Mental illness and madness is always grounded in a time and place. Our ideas change although are narratives is evolutionary. Ways of understanding a persons" relationship to society rather than discrete diseases. Mania, depression, and delusions recorded in 2nd c. Madness was viewed as something caused from within the body. This idea was abandoned in when the roman empire fell, then revived by islamic scholars. In europe many attributed madness to a spiritual cause or an imbalance of bodily fluids. Treatment was not medical because the source of the behaviour was not medical: treatment was praying, blood letting, burning, or nothing at all. Drilling a hole into a person"s skull. Some say it created a hole through which demons/spirits escaped. Others say that the hole relieved pressure on the brain.
