'In this book, Professor Diethelm uses 1100 of these disserations printed from 1750 to illustrate the development of psychiatry. What a wonderful work of scholarship this is - and how exciting must have been the chase, which has provided Cornell with a unique collection. A book for the bibliophile and collector with a specialist knowledge of psychiatric history.' British Journal of Psychiatry

This consideration of the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in 17th century medicine sets out to show how, in the period between 1630 and 1730, medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity and was influenced by the current developments of the day.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

This magisterial work explores how Renaissance Germans understood and experienced madness. It focuses on the insanity of the world in general but also on specific disorders; examines the thinking on madness of theologians, jurists, and physicians; and analyzes the vernacular ideas that propelled sufferers to seek help in pilgrimage or newly founded hospitals for the helplessly disordered. In the process, the author uses the history of madness as a lens to illuminate the history of the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the history of poverty and social welfare, and the history of princely courts, state building, and the civilizing process. Rather than try to fit historical experience into modern psychiatric categories, this book reconstructs the images and metaphors through which Renaissance Germans themselves understood and experienced mental illness and deviance, ranging from such bizarre conditions as St. Vitus’s dance and demonic possession to such medical crises as melancholy and mania. By examining the records of shrines and hospitals, where the mad went for relief, we hear the voices of the mad themselves. For many religious Germans, sin was a form of madness and the sinful world was thoroughly insane. This book compares the thought of Martin Luther and the medical-religious reformer Paracelsus, who both believed that madness was a basic category of human experience. For them and others, the sixteenth century was an age of increasing demonic presence; the demon-possessed seemed to be everywhere. For Renaissance physicians, however, the problem was finding the correct ancient Greek concepts to describe mental illness. In medical terms, the late sixteenth century was the age of melancholy. For jurists, the customary insanity defense did not clarify whether melancholy persons were responsible for their actions, and they frequently solicited the advice of physicians. Sixteenth-century Germany was also an age of folly, with fools filling a major role in German art and literature and present at every prince and princeling’s court. The author analyzes what Renaissance Germans meant by folly and examines the lives and social contexts of several court fools.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

The history of the physiological sciences remains an open field of investigation for scholars from different disciplines. A recent shift of interest towards physiology as the mother of many contemporary biomedical disciplines, has been observed on both scientific and historical levels. Due to its unique richness and variety of facts, interpretations, theoretical models, and moreover unanswered questions, physiology remains a matter of considerable, historical and epistemological interest. For scholars interested in the experimental as well as the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the physiological sciences in their broader sense, and concerned by their place within the national and international frameworks of biomedical research, forms of cooperation have been proposed within the networks of the European Association for the History of Medicine and health. The present volume is the first publication of this cooperation. In this volume definite disciplines like neurophysiology and endocrinology, and comparative international aspects are under scrutiny by well established scientists and scholars, physiologists, historians and philosophers. A strong emphasis is placed upon neuroscientific topics like brain localization, functional architecture, physiological mechanisms, behavioral and integrative aspects of the neurosciences, neurotransmission. Local research traditions, national differences and forms of international communication are also examined.

The history of printing, books, and libraries, is confined only to a limited extent within the boundaries of individual countries. There are, indeed, few historical developments which have played a more universal role, in reaction against all kinds of particularism, than type design, printing, book production, publishing, illustration, binding, librarianship, journal ism, and related subjects. Their history should be assessed and studied primarily in an international, not in a local, context. The bibliographical resources, however, which the historian of these sub jects has at his disposal correspond hardly at all to the essentially inter national character of the object of his studies. Since the appearance of the retrospective bibliography of BIG MORE and WYMAN, covering the subject comprehensively up to r88o, the only current bibliography has been the lnternationale Bibliographie des Buck-und Bi bliothekswesens. Covering a representative part of newly published liter ature, it appeared from rgz8, but did not survive the Second World War. More recently, several useful, but limited, bibliographies have appeared.