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Dementia pp 5–19Cite as

Dementia: Historical Overview

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Abstract

To prevent projecting onto the past perspectives that belong to the present, historical method recommends that a historical overview of dementia distinguish between the history of the word and that of the concepts and behaviours nowadays associated with it. This chapter will concentrate on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it was during this period that the current notion of dementia was constructed. The narrowing down of the clinical scope of ‘dementia’ started during the 1860s, and culminated in the early 1900s with the consolidation of the ‘cognitive paradigm’, i.e. the view that dementia only consisted in an irreversible disorder of intellectual functions (Berrios, 1990a). Historical analysis shows that this restrictive definition resulted more from theoretical change than observation: this is why the cognitive paradigm has shown to have limited value in the resolution of problems such as the identification of ‘early caseness’, explanation of the variety of non-cognitive symptoms and behaviours that accompany dementia, and even the search for the brain sites responsible for the disease (Berrios, 1989).

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Authors
  1. G. E. Berrios
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, UK

    Alistair Burns (Professor of Old Age Psychiatry) (Professor of Old Age Psychiatry)

  2. Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK

    Raymond Levy (Professor of Old Age Psychiatry) (Professor of Old Age Psychiatry)

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Berrios, G.E. (1994). Dementia: Historical Overview. In: Burns, A., Levy, R. (eds) Dementia. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6805-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6805-6_1

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