Philippe Pinel

But the disagreeable characteristics of its founder and the countermining of his enemies, especially the highly esteemed Cullen, contributed their share.

Philippe Pinel, 1745-1826, founded a theory called realism.

He is famous for the efforts he made to improve the conditions of the insane and for his study and treatment of mental diseases.

Pinel became of great importance in the development of general medicine by his principle of substituting exclusively the analytic, or so-called natural scientific, method for the synthetic method heretofore in vogue.

He sought to determine diseases by a diagnosis carefully constructed from the symptoms, a thing which he considered easy.

He desired further to classify them in accordance with their pure symptoms, a matter which he regarded as practicable, inasmuch as he considered disease a simple, indivisible whole, composed of chief symptoms, following each other with perfect regularity and varying only in unessential collateral phenomena, and capable of classification like the objects of the natural sciences.

Perhaps the artificial classifications of Linnaeus and others may have supplied him with models.

Pathological anatomy he subordinated to the symptoms.

Then came the Age of Enlightenment and what historians called the moral treatment movement.

There were philosophers like Philippe Pinel in France and reformers like William Tuke in England, and they argued that the insane did deserve humane care, so they removed the chains and patients were treated with more dignity.

Asylums became fashionable institutions then.

They were often built on picturesque grounds with gardens and exercise yards.

Perhaps the important occurrences of the period may have been partially responsible for this — an explanation which applies with particular force to France — but the disagreeable characteristics of its founder and the countermining of his enemies, especially the highly esteemed Cullen, contributed their share.

Philippe Pinel founded a theory called realism.

He is famous for the efforts he made to improve the conditions of the insane, and for his study and treatment of mental diseases.

Pinel became of great importance in the development of general medicine by his principle of substituting exclusively the analytic, or so-called natural-scientific, method for the synthetic method heretofore in vogue.

He sought to determine diseases by a diagnosis carefully constructed from the symptoms, a thing which he considered easy.

He desired further to classify them in accordance with their pure symptoms, a matter which he regarded as practicable, inasmuch as he considered disease a simple, indivisible whole, composed of chief symptoms, following each other with perfect regularity and varying only in unessential collateral phenomena, and capable of classification like the objects of the natural sciences.

Perhaps the artificial classifications of Linnaeus and others may have supplied him with models.

Pathological anatomy he subordinated to the symptoms.

How so?

Well, initially, you had figures like Dr. Philip Pinel.

He was a very prominent psychiatrist at the Biceptory Hospital in Paris.

A big deal at the time.

Huge deal.

Pinel examined the boy and essentially dismissed him entirely.

In the incredibly blunt, insensitive terminology of the era, Pinel diagnosed him as an idiot from birth.

Which meant something very specific back then, right?

That is strange.

I know Philippe Pinel in France offered some early glimpses.

He did, yeah.

He described patients with, um, unconnected ideas and shallow dissociated emotions living this kind of automatic existence.