Main description:

The historians, classicists and psychiatrists who have come together to produce Mental Disorders in the Classical World aim to explain how the Greeks and their Roman successors conceptualized, diagnosed and treated mental disorders. The Greeks initiated the secular understanding of mental illness, and have left us a large body of penetrating and thought-provoking writing on the subject, ranging in time from Homer to the sixth century AD. With the conceptual basis of modern psychiatry once again under intense debate, we need to learn from other rational approaches even when they lack modern scientific underpinnings. Meanwhile this volume adds a rich chapter to the cultural and medical history of antiquity. The contributors include a high proportion of the best-regarded scholars in this field, together with papers by some of its rising stars.

Contents:

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations

INTRODUCTORY
I. William V. Harris, Thinking about Mental Disorders in Classical Antiquity

CURRENT PROBLEMS IN THE CLASSIFICATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS
II. Bennett Simon, 'Carving Nature at the Joints': the Dream of a Perfect Classification of Mental Illness III. Julian C. Hughes, If Only the Ancients Had Had the DSM, All Would Have Been Crystal Clear: Reflections on Diagnosis

GREEK CLASSIFICATIONS
IV. Chiara Thumiger, The Early Greek Medical Vocabulary of Insanity: Semantics and Distribution
V. Jacques Jouanna and Veronique Boudon-Millot, The Typology and Etiology of Madness in Ancient Greek Medical and Philosophical Writing
VI. Vivian Nutton, Galenic Madness
VII. Veronique Boudon-Millot, What Is a Mental Illness, and how Can it Be Treated? Galen's Reply as a Doctor and Philosopher
VIII. Brooke Holmes, Disturbing Connections: Sympathetic Affections, Mental Disorder, and the Elusive Soul in Galen
IX. Katja Maria Vogt, Plato on Madness and the Good Life

PARTICULAR SYNDROMES
X. Roberto Lo Presti, Mental Disorder and the Perils of Definition: Characterizing Epilepsy in Greek Scientific Discourse (5th-4th Centuries B.C.E.)
XI. Peter E. Pormann, Medical Epistemology and Melancholy: Rufus of Ephesus and Miskawayh
XII. George Kazantzidis, 'Quem nos furorem, illi vocant': Cicero on Melancholy
XIII. Helen King, Fear of Flute Girls, Fear of Falling

SYMPTOMS, CURES AND THERAPY
XIV. William V. Harris, Greek and Roman Hallucinations
XV. Philip van der Eijk, Cure and the (In)curability of Mental Disorders in Ancient Medical and Philosophical Thought
XVI. Christopher Gill, Philosophical Therapy as Preventive Psychological Medicine

FROM HOMER TO ATTIC TRAGEDY
XVII. Suzanne Said, From Homeric ate to Tragic Madness
XVIII. Glenn W. Most, The Madness of Tragedy

MENTAL DISORDERS AND RESPONSIBILITY
XIX. Maria Michela Sassi, Mental Illness, Moral Error, and Responsibility in Late Plato
XX. David Konstan, The Rhetoric of the Insanity Plea

A ROMAN CODA
XXI. Peter Toohey, Madness in the Digest
XXII. J. P. Toner, The Psychological Impact of Disasters in the Age of Justinian

Bibliography
Index