Read Madness: A Brief History for Free Online Page B

secret motions beneath the skull. It was rather the culmination, and the conclusion, of the Classical tradition. In the century after Burton, the new  anatomy and physiology associated with Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey was to usher in new organic theories of insanity to replace the humours, as will be shown in Chapter 6. Meanwhile developments in philosophy would open up new psychological approaches.

    8 The Stone of Folly by Teniers, seventeenth-century engraving. An itinerant surgeon extracting stones from a grimacing patient’s head symbolizes the extraction of ‘folly’ (insanity).
     
    Towards a psychology
    Late in the eighteenth century the British mad-doctor William Pargeter conjured up the maniac thus:
Let us then figure to ourselves the situation of a fellow creature destitute of the guidance of that governing principle, reason—which chiefly distinguishes us from the inferior animals around us. ... View man deprived of that noble endowment, and see in how melancholy a posture he appears.
    Implicit in Pargeter’s moving depiction is, of course, the ideal from which the madman had fallen, the paragon of homo rationalis. Plato had gloried in the rational soul; medieval theologians had alternately praised and reviled human reason (faith was what a believer needed). Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and other writers of the Italian Renaissance held that man’s superiority to the animals on the Great Chain of Being lay in reason, further extolling the rational civilized male over women, children, and peasants. It was in the seventeenth century above all, however, that the mind became cardinal to philosophical models of man.
    The seminal rationalist in that movement was René Descartes (1594-1650), who convinced himself that reason alone could rescue mankind from drowning in ignorance, confusion, and error. Descartes was born in Normandy and educated by the Jesuits, who introduced him to philosophy, mathematics, and physics. On 10 November 1619, in a quasi-mystical experience recorded in his Discourse on Method (1637), he dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth, resolving to be systematically sceptical about all received knowledge, so as to reconstruct philosophy on the basis of self-evident first principles. Building on the one thing which was beyond doubt—his own consciousness ( Cogito, ergo sum : I am thinking, therefore I exist)—he aspired on that basis to establish principles so clear and distinct ‘that the mind of man cannot doubt their truth’.
    Like all later ‘mechanical’ philosophers, Descartes was determined that the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian cosmos of ‘imaginary’ qualities and ‘fictional’ elements should be replaced by a ‘new philosophy’, solidly grounded in reality: one composed of particles of matter in motion obeying mathematical laws. Logic required the division of Creation into two radically distinct categories, matter, that is ‘extension’ (including body), and mind. Spiritual beings like angels aside, humans alone possessed conscious minds; the behaviour of animals was completely explicable in terms of matter and motion—they were sophisticated machines or automata, devoid of will, feeling, or consciousness. The appearance of such attributes in brutes was due to reflexes—the reflex concept was prominent in his pioneering mechanistic account of the nervous system.
    Descartes equated mind with the incorporeal soul: it was what conferred upon humans their consciousness, moral responsibility, and immortality. Although, being immaterial, it could not be identified with or located in space (‘extension’), he held that the mind docked with the body at the pineal gland, a unitary structure seated in mid-brain. After Descartes’ death, different areas of the brain—including the medulla oblongata (Malpighi, Willis), the corpora striata (Vieussens), and the corpus callosum (Lancisi)—were touted as the true seat of the soul by physicians unimpressed by the pineal