Of Mania: Introduction

Abstract

Classic Text No. 57 is meant to illustrate the way in which the old, pre-1800 clinical notion of mania was transformed into its current counterpart. In Classical times, the term ‘mania’ had been used to refer to three orders of objects: medical (as featured in this introduction and in the Classic text), theological (two Greek deities) (Smith, 1870) and epistemological. In regard to the last, a mania of ‘divine’ origin is mentioned by Plato in the Phaedrus, as a way to gain full knowledge, i.e., to journey from the sensible world to the ideal or intelligible world.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the clinical category ‘mania’ had changed its referent completely: it now named a different symptom-cluster, was inscribed in a novel nosological frame, and was explained by new mechanisms. This metamorphosistook about sixty years to complete, and the extract reprinted below instances the way in which such a process took place within English alienism.