Melancholia and partial insanity

In the medical literature of the eighteenth century melancholia came to be defined as partial insanity. Seventeenth-century English law introduced the term and influenced later forensic concerns about the concept. But the history of melancholia reveals a gradual development of such a concept of limited derangement associated with the delusions usually cited in accounts of this disease. In the early nineteenth century the relationship of melancholia and this concept weakened and was gradually abandoned, the content of the syndrome of melancholia was reduced, and out of this complex process emerged the notion of monomania.

Archaeology · Derangement · Habitus · Insanity · Melancholia · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Medicine Studies · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Psychology