Minimismal Monsters in Our Blood and Brains
The Patient’s Psychiatric Germ Theory of 1833
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15014231 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Cassedy (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 325-345 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature and medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0278-9671 • E-ISSN: 1080-6571 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/lm.2019.0015 |
| PMID | 31885027 |
| OpenAlex | W2998638202 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Fifty years before germ theory revolutionized Western medicine, a linguist named John Gilchrist became convinced that his longstanding mental illness was caused by a microbial infection of his brain, and that microscopic pathogens cause most of the world's diseases. The book that he wrote in 1833 to promote this theory is the earliest published germ theory of mental illness, and one of the earliest published germ theories per se. The work, portions of which are written in verse, was ignored in its time and has been forgotten in ours. Notwithstanding his mental illness, or perhaps even because of it, the author came remarkably close to an accurate description of microbiology-decades ahead of mainstream scientists. This forgotten text suggests some intriguing and hitherto unrecognized ways in which the histories of psychiatry, alternative medicine, and illness writing might be intertwined with the history of germ theory
Germ theory of disease · Mainstream · Mental health · Mental illness · Pathology · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Classics · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology
The most solitary of afflictions
Spreading germs
Profession of medicine
The Birth of the Clinic
The History of Gothic Fiction
Culture and Society
Infectious insanities, surgical solutions
Disability and Life Writing Reports from the Nineteenth-century Asylum
Frances Burney's Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century
Body Language
Silent and Censured Travellers
Madness and Civilization
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |