You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
With this opus, Stanley W. Jackson has given us a labor of love. He has also given us an indication of his love of labor. He writes that his professional lifetime of efforts to ameliorate the distress of various sufferers, many of them depressed, gradually joined with his associated interest in the history of medicine and psychiatry. Together, these became focused on tracing the consistency and co-herence
in the cluster of symptoms and signs referred to as melancholia and depression over a time frame of approximately twenty-five hundred years (pp. ix-x). So the journey begins. It is a journey that delves into the theories that have evolved to explain the etiology and pathogenesis of melancholia and depression. Considerable effort is spent in distinguishing depression as a clinical pathological condition, a disease, from some other assemblage of signs and symptoms. A history of the passions and emotions, the affects, then becomes relevant, as do the physiological and biological substrates of depression. Treatment modalities for depressive diatheses, which often parallel those utilized to treat other diseases in general medicine, are surveyed and compared. Attention is also paid to belief systems other than medicine, such as religion, for dealing with dejected states of mind.
As he extracts quotations to elucidate many writers' ideas on melancholia, the author simultaneously provides us with glimpses and reflections on the more general medical thinking of the various times. The major historical lines bear common denominators. As long ago as ancient Greece and Rome, mental aberrations were thought of either as diseases or symptoms of a disease which should be explained in naturalistic terms (p. 29). They were regarded as psychological manifestations of physiological disturbances, not so different from many modern conceptualizations. The variations came in the theories of localizing the site of the illness. Most believed that melancholia was an affliction