Page:The Modern Treatment of Mental and Nervous Disorders.djvu/9

— 7 — ascribe to mental or nervous disorder were thought to be due to evil spirits which inhabited the body of their victim, and the patient was said to be "possessed by devils." It followed that the only treatment practised in those times was the employment of exorcism, ceremonials and incantations. This was also the age of witchcraft, and it seems clear that the greater number of those accused of witchcraft were persons whom we should now class as neurotic or insane, and who then suffered death for the crime of being merely ill. The procedures of the famous witch trials were often based on the detection of symptoms which are commonplaces in the modern nerve hospital. One such symptom, for example, was the existence of a patch of insensitive skin somewhere on the body of the alleged witch, a symptom known then as the "devil's claw," and now by the less lurid name of "hysterical anæsthesia."

These ancient superstitions have more than a merely historical interest, because their effect has lasted through the centuries, and is to be seen to-day in the stigma which still attaches to mental disease. The fear, the feeling of something uncanny and mysterious, the desire for concealment from the eyes of our neighbour, which continue to characterise the general attitude towards insanity, have at least one of their roots in these old conceptions which regarded insanity as a manifestation of the supernatural and demoniacal.

So far as cultivated thought was concerned, however, these conceptions were swept away by the growth of science, and by the nineteenth century