http://mindhacks.com/2011/12/27/unlikely-causes-of-dementia/ Neuroscience and psychology news and views. Wed, 22 May 2013 13:23:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://mindhacks.com/2011/12/27/unlikely-causes-of-dementia/#comment-24768 Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:43:51 +0000 http://mindhacks.com/?p=20933#comment-24768 Actually the list described above cannot really be called strange from an historical point of view. If you look at the early work of the phrenologists – people like Gall and Spurzheim – this list is instantly recognizable. Spurzheim’s book on insanity lists very similar causes. There is, in addition, the fact that even in the 1830s, the new pathological-anatomical revolution in medicine was so new that there were generations of physicians who thought about medical problems in terms the humoral model of medicine. The list you give here could have easily been pulled from George Cheyne’s “The English Malady.” You see similar considerations showing up in Parkinson’s treatise on the shaking palsy. Add into this context: a rich milieu of nascent capitalism, new nationalisms, and industrialization, and it becomes easy to see how the rapid transformation of society and culture in France, Britain, and other places would have concerned figures like Esquirol.

]]> http://mindhacks.com/2011/12/27/unlikely-causes-of-dementia/#comment-24737 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:14:33 +0000 http://mindhacks.com/?p=20933#comment-24737 [...] Unlikely causes of dementia – dementia was caused by “physical pain, violence, drugs, old age or the persuasion of a woman”! [...]

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