Emotions and Mental Illness

The concept of mental illness began to gain prominence in Paris during the 1790s, when Philippe Pinel was working as physician at the hospice of Bicêtre, a state-funded institution which housed 4,000 inmates, including criminals, syphilitics, elderly paupers, and some 200 madmen. In 1794 Pinel presented a report to the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, arguing that some forms of mental alienation were curable and that it was essential for physicians to determine the cause of each patient’s illness by making careful notes based on observations of their behaviour and individual interviews. ¹ In promoting the use of close observation as a diagnostic method, he was following the authoritative example of Hippocrates, as he would note in the introduction to the Traité Medico-Philosophique sur l’Aliénation mentale (1801). ² The Traité was soon translated into other European languages (German, 1801; Spanish, 1804; English, 1806; Italian, 1830), though Pinel’s introduction was not always included in the translations. ³