Mental Disorders in the Classical World ed. by W. V. Harris (review)

W. V. Harris’s new edited volume, Mental Disorders in the Classical World, addresses a topic that has for a while needed closer study. While mental disease is hardly a topic untouched by ancient historians and classicists, it has long presented a gap in the study of ancient medicine and medical authors. This new collaborative effort provides a good starting point for future work.

The book is the edited result of two conferences, and therefore represents a mixture of approaches in which some source texts are represented more than others. One gratifying feature of this volume is the resistance to anachronistic readings of the ancients against modern diagnosis while still maintaining an awareness of modern psychology and psychiatry. The result is a volume that engages and questions modern constructs of the mind as much as ancient, thus bringing home the importance of this topic to an understanding of Western medicine.

Plato, Aristotle, the Hippocratics, and Galen are all very well represented, but much remains to be done to expand the work done here to other medical authors. There is, for instance, little mention of Lucretius, Celsus, Pliny the Elder, Artemidorus, or Soranus, although those authors (and many others) certainly did write about mental disorders. This tendency is to be expected, given that these authors are those most respected and represented in subsequent Western medicine. Also, scholars of ancient philosophy and tragedy have the strongest recent interest in discussing mental illness, and their work addressing the development of language and conceptions of the mind, both in health and disorder, can and should be applied to the discussion of medical authors. These chapters may be most interesting to scholars of intellectual history and/or literary madness, but they may be less useful to historians of the clinical treatment and management of the mentally ill.

The book is organized topically rather than chronologically, as is appropriate for a group of chapters that often span vast periods (in many of them Hippocrates to Galen, about six hundred years). The first, “Current Problems in the Classification of Mental Illness,” includes discussions of the ways in which modern psychology informs and can be informed by its ancient counterparts, and the specific challenges faced by any author discussing mental health, ancient or modern. “Greek Classifications,” as the title suggests, is concerned with the language of mental illness in Greek sources. “Particular Syndromes” covers epilepsy, “melancholy,” comparisons between Latin and Greek diagnostic terms for mental illness, and an examination of two case histories of “phobia” in the Hippocratic corpus. “Symptoms, Cures, and Therapy” groups Harris’s chapter on how hallucinations were understood in various ancient sources with chapters about ancient attitudes toward defining and treating mental illness. “From Homer to Attic Tragedy” discusses the language of mental illness outside of technical (philosophical and medical) literature. “Mental Disorders and Responsibility” considers aspects of how mental competence was understood in philosophy and in legal rhetoric. Finally, “A Roman Coda” uses history and ancient law to discuss the mentally ill in ancient communities.

A few of the chapters may be of particular interest to the readership of BHM. Simon and Hughes’s opening chapters are lucidly written and thought-provoking, and may be the most accessible to historians working in later periods. Of particular note is Hughes’s use of Methodism (a sect of physicians most active during the Roman imperial period) to question the structure of the DSM. His eloquent argument begs a response from ancient historians, Methodism being an area of the history of Greco-Roman medicine that is in need of far more attention.

Helen King’s “Fear of Flute-Girls, Fear of Falling” uses cultural context to read two specific case studies in the Hippocratic Corpus, and provides a good model for future efforts to interpret particular cases through a lens that resists retroactive modern diagnosis, yet still contributes to modern understandings of how mental diseases develop...