40 THE CAEE ATTD TREATMENT OF THE INSAISTE. 



Hippocrates and the Greco-Roman period represented by 

 the names of Asclepiades, Celsus, Aretaeus, Soranusand 

 Galen. Their writings, although fragmentary ahd in- 

 complete in many respects, show that they possessed an 

 accurate knowledge of some forms of insanity and that 

 their treatment of lunatics was marked by an amount of 

 wisdom and kindness which would be no discredit to 

 physicians of to-day. 



Unfortunately, however, the bright prospects for medi- 

 cal advancement which existed with the dawn of Christi- 

 anity were destined to soon fade away. With the fall of 

 the Roman Empire, the decay of medicine began and the 

 achievements of antiquity sank into oblivion. The 

 knowledge possessed by the ancients disappeared more 

 and more and soon the fact of the physical basis of in- 

 sanity was entirely forgotten and the old doctrines of 

 demoniacal possession returned with increased force. 

 The devil was suspected everywhere and superstition 

 and religious bigotry struggled for the upper hand in the 

 treatment of the insane. In quiet cases the symptoms 

 of the disease were regarded as sins and were treated by 

 confessions, fastings and self-castigations and prayer. 

 But when prayers and exorcism were of no avail the 

 most cruel tortures that could be invented by human 

 ingenuity were tried. The whipping post, the torture 

 chamber, and the funeral pyre were resorted to with 

 such frequency that historians tell us that during a 

 period of two hundred years no fewer than fifty thousand 

 persons in Europe were put to death for witch-craft. It 

 was not until 1736 that the laws against witch -craft were 

 finally repealed in England by George the II. During 

 the two preceding centuries the belief in demoniacal pos- 

 session had such a firm hold throughout Europe that 

 even such distinguished physicians as Paracelsus and 

 Ambrose Pare were inclined to believe that in rare cases 

 Satan played the pranks attributed to him by the igno- 



