[Flemish psychiatry from the middle ages to the 18th century]

Psychiatric care or the care of the mentally ill is very ancient. However, psychiatry is only getting a part of medicine from the end of the XVIIIth Century on. Flemish psychiatric care means care for mental disturbed people in our Flemish countries; also we attend to the influences between opinions from stranger and Flemish physicians, philosophers and humanists. In the Middle Ages popular medicine, "healers" and priests interfere with the practice of the rare contemporary physicians and surgeons. Pilgrimage was the meeting-place for popular medicine, medical and religious acting. In Antwerp, Brugge, Ghent, the first hospices, hospitals and asylums arose. Geel got very well known as a unique centre of family care for crazy people. Mental disease was known as phrenesis (madness), melancholia, mania, epilepsy, rabies. In this period the possibilities of healing remained extremely limited. The Renaissance period was one of Humanism and Reform. The humanists developed a new image of humans. More, Erasmus and Vives were most critical against medieval philosophy and charged the medieval irrational thinking. Vives influenced medical, psychological and psychiatric thinking of his Flemish contemporaries. Also we can talk about the rise of Flemish humanistic medicine. For the Renaissance doctor the concept of passions of the soul as constituting disease states, treatable by opposite passions, set the stage for the consideration of affective disorders themselves as species of madness, whereas previously, madness was seen as a disorder of reason. Halfway the XVIIth Century arose what can be seen as the first biological revolution. The discovery by Harvey of the circulation in a closed system meant a sudden revolution of the Galenic scheme and introduced new ways for the physiology. The Flemish doctor J. B. van Helmont spent a long time to the reform of the medical art. His system was a prefiguration of actual functional affections, symptomatic drug therapy and talk therapy. The XVIIIth Century or "siècle des lumières", is characterised by the rapid development of the human sciences. Well-known are the medical school of Halle (Germany) and that of Leiden (Netherlands). The German Stahl was inspired by the van Helmont's system and first he plead for a healthy mental hygiene. The Dutchman Boerhaave studied on the nervous system and analysed the psychic affections in a psychosomatic perspective. With his publication of "Man a machine" the Frenchman La Mettrie was at the base of a new experimental and scientific medical research.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)