A Reappraisal of Psychiatry in the Middle Ages
Jerome Kroll
Many popular histories of psychiatry accept prejudices equating the Middle Ages as Dark and thereby focus unduly on insanity demonology. They fail to distinguish lay notions professional approaches times, ignore an unbroken tradition medical empiricism. Review origins Inquisition corrects notion that it was established persecute witches, hysterics, lunatics. All natural events were viewed simultaneously having supernatural significances, mental illnesses not singled out from entire range private public misfortunes, ranging illness, accidents, famines, plagues, disasters war. It until Renaissance Enlightenment mass witchburnings incarceration mentally ill occurred.
Archives of General Psychiatry|PubMed