Philippe Pinel Quotes

En ese territorio cerrado del “loquero” —a veces campo de concentración, a veces observatorio de los lunáticos—, en el marco ideológico de la medicina clasificatoria se produjo la distinción de cinco clases fundamentales: melancolía, manía con delirio, manía sin delirio, demencia e idiotismo, propuesta por Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) que publicó en 1801 su Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale.

Blackwell Island was supposed to have been different. Built as a “beacon for all the world,” it was located on 147 acres in the middle of the East River and was meant to embody the theory of moral treatment that Dix had championed. Its central tenets came from French physician Philippe Pinel, who is credited with breaking his charges free of their chains (literally) and instating a more humanistic approach to treating madness—though his legacy, historians suggest, comes more from myth than reality. “The mentally sick, far from being guilty people deserving of punishment, are sick people whose miserable state deserves all the consideration that is due to suffering humanity,” Pinel said.

moral insanity. The term was first coined by the Englishman James Cowles Prichard in 1835, though much earlier, Philippe Pinel in Paris described something similar. According to Prichard, any person who demonstrated “eccentricity of conduct”5—or who showed “perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper [or] habits”6—could be diagnosed as morally insane. Crucially, the diagnosis could be given even if the person was not delusional or suffering any mental impairment. Moral insanity affected the emotions. Its sufferers were the irrational angry woman or overwrought, expressive man. In all other ways, patients could appear perfectly sane. (Often, they actually were.)