Category: Remembering

The founder of the oldest psychiatric hospital in Latin America was an ex-soldier turned criminal who broke out of jail, escaped the law with the help of a prostitute, and eventually ended up destitute after spending his entire fortune caring for the mentally ill.

I’ve just discovered the amazing story of Bernardino Álvarez after reading up on the (surprisingly sparse) literature on the history of psychiatry in Latin American and particularly the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, the oldest institution on the continent.

The hospital, still in existence as the Fray Bernardino Hospital (although, apparently not in the original building), was founded in 1567 by Álvarez – a remarkable chap who became interested in caring for the mentally ill after attempting for to make amends for a life spent fighting, gambling, debauching, whoring and living off daring crime sprees.

This is from what seems to be the only English language article on his life, from a 1972 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry. It reads like a movie script:

After arriving at what is now Mexico City he was sent to the countryside and fought in several actions in the war against the chichimecas in the north of New Spain. Apparently he was a soldier without too many scruples, for a biographer says that “hate, tears and curses‚” usually followed him. He wanted a shortcut to wealth, however; he disliked discipline and had no taste for the military life.

After this campaign Álvarez returned to Mexico City, then a lively and tempting emporium. Soon he was in trouble, gambling and robbing the gambling houses, drinking heavily, rebelling against the law, joining the delinquents of the city, and eventually being chosen the leader of a small gang. “A handsome and perfidious demon”: this is the way he was described at that time. Finally he and his band were apprehended, imprisoned, and sentenced to forced labor in China. They escaped from prison, though, killing three guards in the process. Some of the band were eventually caught again and hanged but Álvarez, through the aid of a close friend, a prostitute, got arms, money, and horses. He fled to Acapulco and then by sea to Peru.

He later became a wealthy and legitimate business man and, shocked by the way the mentally ill were treated, used his money to build the first mental hospital in the New World.

He was so dedicated that he apparently ended up spending his entire fortune on his new found mission and ended up living in a meagre cell in his own hospital by the time he died.

UPDATE: Thanks to Avicenna who points out that there’s a full version of the article online here. Thanks!

Link to PubMed entry for article on Bernardino Álvarez.

More than half a century before Alfred Kinsey started to study the surprising diversity of human sexual behaviour, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher surveyed Victorian-era women on their bedroom behaviour but buried the results. Her report, its accidental discovery, and the sex lives of 1890s women are covered in a fascinating article for Stanford Magazine.

Mosher was an amazing woman by all accounts and took a scientific approach to testing some of the ‘received wisdom’ of the day, such as that women were inherently weaker and that menstruation was necessarily disabling.

As part of her work, she surveyed women on their experience of sex and sexuality, much as Kinsey would do many decades later.

Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they’d gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like “watching farm animals.” Yet no matter how sheltered they’d initially been, these women had‚Äîand enjoyed‚Äîsex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.

Unlike Mosher’s other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. “She’s actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics‚Äîshe’s really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women,” Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn’t. One slept apart from her husband “to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.” Some didn’t enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] “Thinks men have not been properly trained.”

The whole article is an amazing read, both because Mosher was clearly such a pioneering researcher in a largely male dominated world and because her survey overturns many of our stereotypes about Victorian sexuality.

Link to Stanford Magazine on ‘The Sex Scholar’ (via MeFi)

This is the final resting place of Kitty Jay.

The site, known as Jay’s Grave lies on the edge of Dartmoor, in England’s West Country. No one really knows the full story of her life, as the details have been lost in time, but the tragic tale usually goes something like this.

Kitty Jay was a teenage orphan, probably in the late 1700s, who was given a job in a local farm as an apprentice and later became pregnant by the farmer’s son. Some stories say she fell in love, others that she was raped, but either way, was considered to be an outcast, such was the attitude of the time.

In despair, she hung herself at the farm and this is where she lies. Although we know little about her life, we can infer a few things from her last moments from her now peaceful resting place.

Suicide, then usually referred to as self-murder, was a stigmatised act in the 1700s. In an article on the changing attitudes towards suicide at the time, historian Michael MacDonald describes how:

Self-murderers were tried posthumously by a coroner’s jury, and if they were found to have been responsible for their actions savage penalties were enforced against them and their families. They were declared to have been felones de se, felons of themselves: their chattels, like those of other felons, were forfeited to the crown and placed at the disposal of the king’s almoner or the holder of a royal patent. Their bodies were denied the usual rites of Christian burial. By ancient custom, based on popular lore, the corpses of suicides were interred at a crossroads or in some other public way, laid face down in the grave with a wooden stake driven through them leading to both penalties for the family – mainly the confiscation of property – and spiritual punishment for the deceased, as they were not allowed to be buried on consecrated ground.

The influence of the devil was thought to be key, part of the reason self-murderers were reviled, but this involved a psychological judgement of the deceased. The devil could only tempt those who had the power of reason:

The state of mind of self-killers at the time that they committed their fatal deed was crucial. Men and women who slew themselves when they were mad or otherwise mentally incompetent were not guilty of their crime. Edmund Wingate explained concisely that suicides had to be sane and to take their lives intentionally to be guilty of self-murder: “He is felo de se that doth destroy himself out of premeditated hatred against his own life, or out of a humour to destroy himself’. Idiots or lunatics who were insane when they killed themselves were judged non compos mentis by the coroner’s jury and spared both the secular and the religious punishments for suicide.

Attitudes softened as time went on, however, and by the time of Kitty’s presumed death, the courts declared that most suicides were due to insanity.

Kitty, it seems, was an exception. She was presumably judged sane, and therefore wicked, and buried at a crossroads. Perhaps the fact that she lacked a family meant the coroner’s jury had little incentive to show her leniency.

Her grave, however, is peaceful. It has always had flowers. Legend has it that Dartmoor pixies place them there, but it was known that author Beatrice Chase took the responsibility for many decades.

I have seen Jay’s Grave many times, as it is a regular resting place for walkers, but in recent years it has been resplendent with floral tributes.

Like the Cross Bones graveyard in London, it has become a point of remembrance for forgotten and abandoned people, in the hope that our collective crimes of convenient amnesia are not repeated.

I visited this morning with my father and, for the first time, we left flowers.

Link to Wikipedia page on Jay’s grave.

While we tend to think that the recognition of false confessions is a relatively new development but The Lancet discussed the phenomenon of ‘auto-accusation’ as far back as 1902.

The article discusses the types of people falsely confessing to notorious crimes in early 1900s Paris.

“Auto-accusation” is a curious phenomenon which possesses both medical and legal interest. The committal of a notorious crime which excites popular imagination and which remains undetected for a time often leads to the appearance in law courts of self-accusing culprits who charge themselves with being the authors of the crime in question. Dr. Ernest Dupr√© of Paris in a paper read before the Annual Congress of French Alienists and Neurologists recently held at Grenoble attempts to delineate with exactitude the psychological nature of “auto-accusation” and to show that certain morbid elements play an important part in it.

He points out that “auto-accusation” is not often or merely the result of a weak-mindedness; the subject of it is a person who has positively developed general ideas of unworthiness, guilt, and remorse, and in a word is suffering from mild melancholia with vague delusions of guilt and sin. Another type of self-accuser is the proud and vain “degenerate” who with a brain warped by congenital anomaly of development constructs romances of which he readily persuades himself to be the hero or the martyr.

There is, adds Dr. Dupré, a marked contrast between these two types. The one is abject, lowly, self-humiliating; the other proud, egiostic, and vain. Among other types of the same abnormality are found persons of alcoholic or hysterical character. The alcoholic self-accuser is one whose delusion generally has its starting-point in nocturnal or morning hallucinations occurring in a state between sleeping and waking. The physical and mental characters associated with alcoholism permit such cases to be readily recognised and they are almost invariably observed in adult males. The female self-accuser is rarely seen in the law court and she is usually the subject of a marked hysteria.

These would now both be described as ‘voluntary’ false confessions, which can involve both people who are looking for notoriety and those who may believe they are responsible owing to mental health problems impairing the ability to make sense of reality.

These are in contrast to a ‘coerced-compliant’ confession – where someone knows that they’re innocent but takes the rap for whatever reason, and a ‘coerced-internalised’ confession, which can result from the accused starting to doubt their own memory and judgement and start to believe they were responsible, often due in part to high pressure interviewing techniques.

The piece was found via the occasional ‘100 years ago’ section of the British Journal of Psychiatry that picks out interesting items from a century hence.

Link to original article in The Lancet.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has an archive interview from 1978 with Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth K√ºbler-Ross who pioneered the consideration and treatment of the last stages of life as patients were dying of terminal illnesses.

K√ºbler-Ross is best known for her stage model of death and grieving that famously includes denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It has been heavily criticised although it’s true to say that many critics miss the fact that K√ºbler-Ross later disavowed that they are sequential psychological reactions and could appear at any time.

Despite this, the model was based on little except personal observation and insight, and seems unable to capture the messiness of genuine grieving. It did, however, act as a lens that concentrated the mind of the medical world on end-of-life care and, in this respect, has been hugely influential.

K√ºbler-Ross became famous after a 1969 article appeared in Life magazine. Entitled ‘A Profound Lesson for the Living’ it finds her discussing death with terminally ill young people, which, at the time, was a difficult and taboo topic.

The All in the Mind interview sees her almost a decade after her work was first widely publicised, and is full of what is now considered to be the received wisdom about dealing with dying patients.

This was exactly the point where K√ºbler-Ross’ star began to fade, however, largely due to her increasing interest in dodgy practices like spirit channelling and association with some guru-like figures of questionable moral standing.

An article from Time magazine in 1979 exposed her increasingly flaky approach to the topic (the last paragraph is high comedy) and was influential in her quiet rejection from the medical mainstream.

The 2002 documentary film Facing Death: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (a pain to get hold of but available on some torrent servers) captures her when she herself was slowly dying. It looks back on her remarkable and not untroubled life and finds her having difficulty adjusting to her own mortality.

Link to All in the Mind Kübler-Ross interview.

H-Madness is a fantastic new blog on the history of madness written by professional historians with a clear passion for their work.

Although aimed at “university and college faculty, students, and independent researchers” it is written in a striaghtforward style and includes original articles, book and film reviews, as well as news about academic publications, events and talks.

There are occasionally posts in French or German, which, to be honest, I find a bit annoying as I can’t read them and they often look very interesting, although you’ll often find an English translation just below.

It’s a great read and makes a fine compliment to existing high quality history sites like the Advances in the History of Psychology blog and The Neuro Times.

Link to H-Madness (via Somatosphere).

I was surprised to find out that as well as being the patron saint of love, St Valentine is also the patron saint of epilepsy. I’ve just found a study that analysed six centuries of artistic depictions of the holy figure where he is often accompanied by people having seizures.

The paper has a good description of St Valentine’s historical association with what was known as the “falling sickness” or “the sacred disease”. This link to the condition may be based on little more than the fact that his name sounds like the old German word for fall.

In Christianity, saints were of great significance in the treatment of severe and chronic illnesses, as their intercession with God was considered to have a great therapeutic effect on human ailments. In some illustrations of SV [Saint Valentine], the aspect of exorcising demons in connection with epilepsy is depicted as a demon flying out of the mouth of a sick person [see image on left].

Of the more than 40 named “epilepsy saints” (among others, Aegidius, Anastasia, Antonius, Cosmas, Cyriacus, Damian, John the Baptist, Ladislas of Hungary, Veit, Zeno), SV was the most well known and he was the saint who was invoked most often. Today, we can no longer verify whether his patronage was based on the phonetic use of his name with the word fall, as Luther had suspected, or on an incident in his legend (SV is said to have healed a person with epilepsy).

Two saints with the name Valentine were and are worshipped in the Roman Catholic Church: Valentine of Terni, patron saint day February 14, and Valentine of Rhaetia, patron saint day January 7. Valentine of Rhaetia is one of the patron saints of the Passau/Bavaria and Chur/Switzerland dioceses. People with epilepsy are portrayed in illustrations of both Valentine of Terni and Valentine of Rhaetia.

It is likely that two saints with the name Valentine had their patron saint day on February 14. Although the two SVs are sometimes entered separately in martyrologies and biographies, most scholars believe they are the same person. The patronage is complex, as SV’s help is invoked not only against diseases of cattle and pigs, but also against a host of human ailments, such as diseases of the uterus, gout, and, most notably, fainting, madness, and epilepsy. The use of pigs as attributes in illustrations of SV leads us to assume that there is also a reference to the description of the “healing of the demoniac of Gadara” (Mark 5:1–19; Lucas 8:26–40; Matthew 8:28–34). This passage in the Bible is interpreted as the curing of a person who possibly had epilepsy…

In medieval German language, the “falling sickness” was sometimes referred to as “St. Valentine’s illness, St. Veltin’s infirmity”.

The article is full of wonderful historical illustrations of St Valentine surrounded by or curing people with epilepsy, but sadly the article is locked behind a pay wall.

Link to PubMed entry for St Valentine art and epilepsy study.

William Stewart Halsted is known as the ‘father of American surgery’ and was widely-known to have been addicted to both cocaine and morphine for large stretches of his life. I always assumed this was due to recreational sampling of the medicine cabinet but it turns out it was the rather unfortunate result of some initially serious scientific experimentation.

I just found this article on Halsted from The Annals of Surgery that explains the astounding and tragic story.

Halsted’s career changed dramatically on October 11, 1884, when he read in the Medical Record a report of the Ophthalmological Congress in Heidelberg. Dr. Henry D. Noyes, who had attended the conference, reported that the most notable event at the Congress was a demonstration of the extraordinary anesthetic power that a 2% solution of muriate of cocaine had on the cornea and conjunctiva when it was dropped into the eye. Later in his report, he was prophetic in his summary that “it remains, however, to investigate all the characteristics of this substance, and we may yet find that there is a shadow side as well as a brilliant side in the discovery.”

After reading this report, Halsted quickly obtained cocaine and began a series of experiments on himself, colleagues, and medical students that led to the development of local and regional anesthesia. Through a series of brilliant experiments, Halsted showed that virtually every peripheral nerve in the body could be injected with cocaine so that its peripheral distribution was anesthetized entirely and thus rendered insensitive to surgical interventions. This, of course, was of particular interest to dentists, and in 1922, shortly before his death, his priority in being the first to show the anesthetic properties possible with local infiltration of nerves was established by the National Dental Association. Unfortunately, during the process of these experiments, Halsted and several of his colleagues became addicted to cocaine. Only Halsted and Dr. Richard Hall, who moved subsequently to Santa Barbara, California, for his rehabilitation, survived. The rest died of their addiction.

Halsted’s only publication on local and regional anesthesia appeared in the New York Medical Journal in 1885. This article is a rambling, incoherent paper that is a testament to the addicted debilitated state that Halsted had reached. The first sentence of that article reads as follows: “Neither indifferent as to which of how many possibilities may best explain, nor yet at a loss to comprehend, why surgeons have, and that so many, quite without discredit, could have exhibited scarcely any interest in what, as a local anesthetic, had been supposed, if not declared, by most so very sure to prove, especially to them, attractive, still I do not think that this circumstance, or some sense of obligation to rescue fragmentary reputation for surgeons rather than the belief that an opportunity existed for assisting others to an appreciable extent, induced induced me, several months ago, to write on the subject in hand the greater part of a somewhat comprehensible paper, which poor health disinclined me to complete.”

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to full text at PubMed central.

France has some of the world’s most spectacular cave paintings that depict wild animals in vivid outline surrounded by what were thought to be purely decorative markings.

These markings have been all but ignored until recent research, covered in a fascinating New Scientist article, gathered examples from 146 cave sites and found they shared core symbols and were arranged in meaningful patterns.

While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.

According to the article, these seemingly meaningful groupings, potentially representing a sort of proto-writing, raise the question of whether symbolic communication developed far earlier than was previously thought.

It’s a wonderfully thought-provoking article and don’t miss the fantastic illustrations that accompany the piece.

Link to NewSci article ‘The writing on the cave wall’.

During World War Two, the US Government considered setting up ‘rumour clinics’ to collect and analyse hearsay that might undermine the war effort. The government plan never got off the ground but the idea was taken up by independent psychologist who create numerous clinics that aimed to debunk popular rumours and educate the American public about the psychology of tittle-tattle.

This little known chapter in the history of the war is outlined in an article for the History of Psychology journal which describes how the famous Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport created one of the most successful wartime clinics which tackled some quite surprising rumours:

The set-up of the Boston Clinic became the prototype for the many clinics that would follow in the months to come. The focal point of the Clinic was a column published every Sunday in the newspaper. Prevalent rumors were chosen for analysis and refutation. These rumors would be labeled as such and printed in italics, followed by an answer or refutation labeled “Fact” and printed in bold type. Frequently, the column would include a psychological analysis of prevalent rumors, aimed at increasing public understanding of the psychological motives underlying the spread of different types of rumor. The column was also distributed to high schools and posted on community bulletin boards, with the expectation that such measures would promote public understanding of rumor in wartime. In addition to counteracting rumors, members of the clinic were often also responsible for classifying and analyzing rumor data, distributing flyers, gauging public opinion, and giving speeches on wartime rumor spreading.

In the first column of the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic, rumors were reported to the Clinic by “official agencies”; by the following Sunday, however, the Clinic had begun receiving and analyzing rumors sent in by readers. All readers were encouraged to provide rumors, with the only stipulation being that they must sign their names; anonymous rumors would not be considered. By the third week, the Clinic had received more rumors than they had time or space to analyze (“The rumor clinic,“ 1942b). Rumors ranged from the simplistic and common to the elaborate and eccentric.

The most common rumors analyzed in the Herald were those pertaining to waste of rationed materials, government dishonesty and corruption, mistreatment of American soldiers, the imminence of defeat or victory, and the future value of war bonds. Unusual or less feasible rumors were also considered, including a story circulating about glass or poison being found in crabmeat packed in Japan (The rumor clinic, 1942d) and a story about a woman employed at a shell filing factory whose head exploded after receiving a permanent at the local beauty parlor (The rumor clinic, 1942c). These latter types of anecdotes received less attention in the column, but appeared periodically amid a sea of more common rumors, such as those regarding rationing and corruption.

Unfortunately the full article is locked behind a paywall, so, ironically, you only have access to this second-hand information.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

Slate has just published an article I wrote on how media scare stories that warn us that technology will damage the mind have been with us from the time of the printing press and continue to the present day.

A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both “confusing and harmful” to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an “always on” digital environment. It’s worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once used e-mail and was completely ignorant about computers. That’s not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press.

My favourite chapter in the long history of how information dissemination has been assumed to damage the mind is the protracted debate that occurred when schools became compulsory.

They were thought to take children away from their ‘natural’ development and study was widely considered to be a danger, with many medical texts of the time citing excessive study as the cause of madness (e.g. this one)

Interestingly, the relatively recent diagnosis of ADHD is almost the reverse, and not being able to concentrate on school work is now considered a mental illness.

That’s not to say that all technology and all uses of technology are harmless. For example, there is growing evidence that television viewing by young children is associated with slowed cognitive development but the media is typically obsessed with the newest technology rather than the actual risks identified by health studies.

Link to Slate article on tech scares and the media.

Roman gladiators took part in one of the most brutal sports in history, many dying by traumatic brain injury during their matches. A medical study published in Forensic Science International examined the skulls of deceased fighters, discovered in a gladiator graveyard from Turkey, and reveals exactly how they died and even what weapons delivered the fatal brain injury.

The graveyard was discovered by archaeologists in 1993 but this study is the result of applying modern forensic medicine, which more typically attempts to discover the cause of death by looking at human remains after a crime, to the ancient bones.

Gladiator matches were not free for alls. Each gladiator had a certain attack and defence weapon combination, and these were matched between pairs of fighters so none had an unfair advantage. Men of equal, speed, strength and skill were also matched together to ensure a fair fight.

Since no point system existed, fighting was always pursued until a decisive outcome, which could be any of the following alternatives: defeat through death, defeat due to injury preventing further combat, defeat due to exhaustion, a win, with the bestowal of a palm branch or a laurel crown, or a draw, with both opponents being allowed to depart the Arena alive. This was the most unlikely case, since the superiority of one fighter had to be proved to enable the public to reach a verdict.

The final decision of the loser’s fate resided within the hands of the games‚Äô organizer. To this end he appealed to the mood of the plebs. Upon the cry of iugula (lance him through), it was expected of the vanquished that he would set an example of the greatness of manhood (exemplum virtutis) and would motionlessly receive the death thrust. The turning down of the thumb signified to the spectators, not that the gladiator should be put to death, but rather that the gladiator was dead.

After the final blow, arena servants carried the combatant on a stretcher into the carcass chamber and gave the twitching body a deathblow. It is not known exactly how this execution was performed. The executor, a costumed arena servant, associated with the Roman god of death “Dis Pater” or the Etruscan counterpart “Charun” carried a deadly hammer accompanying the gladiator on his last journey.

The first task of the investigators was to work out whether the damage to the skulls was due to an earlier blow the fighter survived, the death blow, or whether the bones had been damaged since the fighter was buried.

Living bone contains fluid-filled vessels, grease, and collagen fibres, which makes it more durable, flexible and, most importantly, it doesn’t splinter when broken. This allowed the research team to work out which skull fractures happened at the time of death. Furthermore, any sign of fracture healing shows that the gladiator survived the injury.

Once this had been established the researchers could start to match up the deadly fractures with the types of weapon they knew existed at the time.

Two examples of skulls are on the right, with the likely weapons that delivered the final blow illustrated in the white boxes underneath – one a hammer and the other a trident. These were identified by looking at the unique damage patterns caused by the impact of specific weapons.

Out of the 10 skulls with deadly fractures, the cause of death in 7 was a puncture wound from weapons such as a trident, javelin, pointed hammer or sword, and, interestingly, three were caused by being hit by the blunt force of a shield.

Deadly blows were either over the frontal area (above the eyes and forehead) or the parietal area (above and slightly behind the ears), whereas all the blows that the gladiators survived were at the front of the skull.

The researchers suggest that this is because death blows were usually given after the gladiator had been beaten and so were more likely to be from behind, whereas survivable blows were more likely to occur in training where less deadly weapons were used.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘Head injuries of Roman gladiators’.

I just stumbled across this fascinating article from the Journal of the History of Neurosciences about the use of gladiators’ blood as a cure for epilepsy in Ancient Rome. Surprisingly, the practice continued into modern times.

Between horror and hope: gladiator’s blood as a cure for epileptics in ancient medicine.

J Hist Neurosci. 2003 Jun;12(2):137-43.

Moog FP, Karenberg A.

Between the first and the sixth century a single theological and several medical authors reported on the consumption of gladiator’s blood or liver to cure epileptics. The origins of the sacred or apoplectic properties of blood of a slain gladiator, likely lie in Etruscan funeral rites. Although the influence of this religious background faded during the Roman Republic, the magical use of gladiators’ blood continued for centuries. After the prohibition of gladiatorial combat in about 400 AD, an executed individual (particularly had he been beheaded) became the “legitimate” successor to the gladiator. Occasional indications in early modern textbooks on medicine as well as reports in the popular literature of the 19th and early 20th century document the existence of this ancient magical practice until modern times. Spontaneous recovery of some forms of epilepsy may be responsible for the illusion of therapeutic effectiveness and for the confirming statements by physicians who have commented on this cure.

The article has some amazing reports of how the practice continued into the last century:

In his autobiography, the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen reported a striking observation in 1823: ‘‘I saw a pitiful poor person made to drink by his superstitious parents a cup of the blood of an executed person, in an attempt to cure him from epilepsy.’’ At the public execution of a murderer in the provincial town of Hanau near Frankfurt in 1861, a crowd of women had to be prevented by police from dipping rags into the freshly-spilled blood. At about the same time executioners in Berlin were paid two taler per blood-drenched handkerchief.

A last and final dramatic report of this kind was published in a Saxon newspaper in 1908 after the execution of a murderess: ‘‘On the day of the execution an old woman from a neighbouring village pushed her way through the crowds around the court buildings to request a small amount of the delinquent’s blood from the security officials. She wanted to help a young girl related to her who suffered from epilepsy, as the blood of an executed person was believed to have great healing power against this disease’’ (quoted from Seyfarth, 1913, p. 279).

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to DOI entry for same.

I’ve just found this fascinating 2007 snippet from the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience on Adolf Hitler’s mysteriously missing psychiatric file from the time he was admitted to hospital following First World War injuries.

The article mentions that he was reportedly diagnosed with hysterical or non-organic blindness, something that nowadays would be diagnosed as dissociative disorder or conversion disorder, which signifies that a seemingly ‘physical’ problem occurs without any detectable physical origin.

The traditional and still popular explanation is that the mind is converting trauma to a physical symptom to protect itself from distress, although there is not a great deal of evidence for this theory.

However, it seems his file from this hospital admission disappeared and everyone who had knowledge about the case was apparently killed by the SS.

The recent 60 years anniversary of the end of World War II and the Nazi regime may be reason for a short psychiatric-historical note to point out a frequently overlooked detail of Hitler’s life‚Äîhis hidden psychiatric biography. Besides his extreme anti-semitism, mentally ill were among the most threatened individuals with some 200,000 being killed. This was made public during World War II by the Muenster cardinal Galen who most recently was beatified by pope Benedikt XVI. While Hitler’s late Parkinson disease has attracted some attention, his former functional ‚Äòhysteric‚Äô blindness is almost unknown.

In fact on 14th October 1918 Hitler, who served as a private in World War I, survived a mustard gas attack in Belgium near Ypern. There are some reports that he consecutively had a mild resultant conjunctivitis. He also suffered from nonorganic blindness. His further treatment is nearly unknown. Hitler was transferred to the military hospital in Pasewalk near Stettin/Baltic sea. Prof. Forster, chair at that psychiatric clinic, treated him by using hypnosis. Hitler was discharged on 19th November 1918 and never mentioned this period again.

His treatment is proven by eyewitness of Dr. Karl Kroner who later reported the facts to the US intelligence Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Hitlers’ file disappeared and all people who were closely involved or had special knowledge of this file were killed by the ‘Gestapo’, including Prof. Forster who probably was forced to commit suicide on 9th November 1933. Before that he succeeded in presenting these documents to exile writers in Paris where his brother was employed at the German embassy. The German Jewish writer Ernst Weiss, a physician himself, used the original documents in his novel ‘Der Augenzeuge’ (The Eyewitness) before he committed suicide during the German occupation of Paris on 6th May 1940.

The original file is lost but for all we know Hitler had a psychiatric history, which may not explain his savage ideas but throws an interesting light on his anti-psychiatric attitude.

Maybe it’s in the Albert Hall, along with that other important medical artefact from the F√ºhrer.

However, I note from the Wikipedia page on Hitler’s medical history that there have been many claims about Hitler’s health, many of them not well verified.

Nevertheless, he was subject to not one, but two, wartime Freudian character analyses commissioned by the OSS – the forerunner to the CIA. The first was completed by psychologist Henry Murray and the second by psychoanalyst Walter Langer.

The reports have many oddities and are largely opinion but they concluded that Hitler was a neurotic psychopath, probably had paranoid schizophrenia, was likely impotent, was a repressed homosexual and, most famously, would likely kill himself.

Although to be fair, the latter point did not describe dying a miserable death in a bunker but included various movie-style scenarios where he would blow himself up in a dynamite rigged mountain, use a single silver bullet or throw himself off a parapet as troops came to take him prisoner.

I’ve no idea how useful these reports ever were but they probably tell us more about the trends in psychology of the time than anything about the Nazi leader’s mind.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments… There’s an excellent post on the wartime character analysis reports over at the Providentia blog.

Link to short article on ‘Hitler‚Äôs missing psychiatric file’.

The Times has an excellent article summarising recent research on the possibility of treating traumatic memories by tempering their impact either just after the event or when remembering the experience at a later point.

The ability to update our memories with new information highlights the flexibility of our brain. Every act of remembering gives us an opportunity to shape memories, or even erase them. The discovery of the reconsolidation window has kick-started a lot of new memory research, advances in which could have important implications for people who suffer from unwanted fearful memories. Potential treatments for anxiety, phobias or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be close at hand.

It’s a remarkably wide-ranging article that covers both chemical and psychological methods that have been drawn from recent research and is probably the best concise summary of this research you’ll be likely to read for a good while.

Much of the initial interest in this area was on a drug called propranolol, that doesn’t affect the brain’s memory circuits directly but does reduce tension in the body. Several experiments showing it reduced traumatic responses when taken immediately after a severe event generated a lot of hope that it might be a new way of preventing catastrophic reactions.

Recent findings have dulled the excitement a little though, as two studies have come out on burns victims, one in soldiers and another in children, and the drug had no detectable effect on trauma.

The Times article also mentions that “the drug merely changes the emotional content of memories, rather than erasing them” although this point is controversial.

Some studies that have tested the effect on recalling tragedy or trauma stories have found a genuine reduction in the amount of information recalled, not only the emotional ‘kick’ of the memories.

One similar study didn’t find this effect and a recent experiment directly compared propranolol to placebo and the stress hormone cortisol and found no effect of propranolol on memory, but another study found it did reduce short-term memory overall although it also lessened the impact of emotional distractions.

This is an important issue, because, as The Times notes, it could have massive implications if memories of a traumatic event form part of a court case after the drug may have ‘tampered’ with the evidence.

The piece by Ed Yong and Alice Fishburn, the former who you may know from the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog and who has put an added an interview with neuroscientist Todd Sacktor online who has completed recent work on the role of the PKMzeta protein in memory.

Link to Times article ‘How to forget fear’.
Link to NERS interview with Todd Sacktor.

The Fortean Times has a delightful article about a period at the turn of the 20th century where there was a brief but intense interest in the possibility of ‘the psychic project¬≠ion of images directly onto film’.

This was sort of thing was much less of a fringe interest then and it drew in some serious scientific and academic heavyweights interested in whether thoughts could be imprinted onto photographic material.

In 1893, the no less enterprising Nicola Tesla came up with a plan for a Gedankenprojektor (‘thought projector’) [pictured]. As he recalled 40 years later: “I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought must by reflex action produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might be read by a suitable apparatus. This brought me to my system of television which I announced at the time… My idea was to employ an artificial retina receiving an object of the image seen, an optic nerve and another retina at the place of reproduction… both being fashioned somewhat like a checkerboard, with the optic nerve being a part of the earth.”

This was a time when radio waves and electricity were still poorly understood and it wasn’t at all clear to many that they were any different to psychic or supernatural phenomena.

As we’ve discussed previously on Mind Hacks, the idea that such technology could allow us a gateway to the ‘spirit world’ was taken quite seriously.

This idea is still prevalant, of course, but doesn’t particularly preoccupy the most eminent scientists of the day.

However, one of my favourite Spanish-language books, and indeed, one of my favourite books in my collection, is a tome entitled 7 Metodos Para Comunicarse Con El Mas Alla, or, ‘7 Methods to Communicate with The Beyond’.

Among other things, it’s a guide to contacting the dead through your computer.

I’ve yet to try it myself as I have enough trouble contacting the living through my computer, plus, receiving penis enlargement spam from the recently deceased must surely be a little discouraging.

Link to Fortean Times on the curious history of ‘thoughtography’.