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KMID : 0857920210240020061
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Yonsei Journal of Medical History
2021 Volume.24 No. 2 p.61 ~ p.81
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The Fate of “Melancholy” in the Formation Period of Modern Psychiatry
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Yeo In-Sok
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Abstract
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Melancholy started as a medical concept based on the humoral theory of Western medicine but has since been used as a term to describe human beings in various fields, such as literature, art, and medicine. The accumulated discussions on melancholy developed in Western culture over thousands of years are summarized in Robert Burton’s extensive book, “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” in the 17th century. However, the concept of melancholy, which was extended to literature, philosophy, and art, as well as to medicine from which it originated, lost its clarity and became a fairly ambiguous concept. As a kind of reaction to the conceptual ambiguity of the past 2000 years, an attempt was made to differentiate the concept of melancholy through the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. Then, with the establishment of modern psychiatry in the 19th century, attempts were made to rearrange melancholy into the category of psychiatry. However, these were not simply attempts to medicalize the concept of melancholy that started from medicine. On the other hand, such attempts were extended to other fields, appearing in the direction of taking only a part of the concept of melancholy that has a medical meaning and expelling from medicine the term “melancholy,” which had become lax as its meaning loosened. This tendency had already appeared in the early 19th century, which can be said to be the founding period of modern psychiatry. In this study, the change of attitude toward melancholy that occurred during the establishment of modern psychiatry in the early 19th century after the Enlightenment in the 18th century was examined. We analyzed the description of the “melancholy” item in the Encyclopedia of Diderot and then, through the writings of French psychiatrists such as Pinel and Esquirol, who are the founding fathers of modern psychiatry, relocated the concept of melancholy within medicine.
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KEYWORD
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melancholy, Pinel, Esquirol, modern psychiatry
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