Abstract
The history of the term ‘melancholia’, as with the concept of dementia, has been a chequered one. In general, an over-inclusive term has been narrowed with age. Like ‘dementatus’, ‘melancholia’ originally embraced the whole range of madness, and it is possible that this meaning survived at least until Elizabethan times. In his magisterial survey of the concept of melancholia, Aubrey Lewis (1934a) pointed to the difficulty in extricating the ideas relating to melancholia from those general to the whole history of psychiatry.
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© 1987 MTP Press Limited
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Mahendra, B. (1987). Depressed minds, discursive thoughts: From melancholia to depression: A brief historical sketch. In: Depression. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3225-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3225-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7947-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-3225-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive