PINEL Philippe Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou la Manie.

Garrison-Morton, 4922 ; Norman (Grolier), 54 ; Norman cat., 1701 ; Waller, 7456; Heirs of Hippocrates, 1070.

First edition of one of the most important texts written by the father of modern psychiatry.

Although finished by 1792, the book was held back due to the French Revolution and eventually was made available in 1801.

During the Revolution Pinel counted Condorcet amongst his patients.

“In 1795 Pinel became chief physician at the Salpêtrière, where he founded that institution’s famous school of psychiatry. There he trained a generation of psychiatrists, the most important being Esquirol, who disseminated his ideas throughout Europe” (Norman).

“Pinel’s classification of mental diseases retained the old divisions of such illnesses as manic, melancholic, demented and idiotic… He nevertheless made finer distinctions, isolating mania from delirium, and pointing out that in this state the intellectual functions might be intact, and, in his description of idiocy, citing stupor, the first stage of some types of mental disease… Pinel’s psychiatric therapeutics, his ‘traitement moral’, represented the first attempt to individual psychotherapy. His treatment was marked by gentleness, understanding, and goodwill… A number of Pinel’s therapeutic procedures, including ergotherapy and the placement of the patient in a family group, anticipate modern psychiatric care” (DSB).

Good copy.