To The Editor: Unlike depression and mania, which are recognizable in ancient manuscripts, schizophrenia does not appear in medical literature until much later. It has been suggested that schizophrenia is a modern illness that developed only recently in human history. Evans et al. reviewed medical literature from ancient Greece and Rome and noted the lack […]
Abstract: The hypothesis that schizophrenia is a recent disease can explain why descriptions of schizophrenia-like disorders were rare before 1800, why the prevalence of insanity in the Western world increased during the 19th but remained low in the non-Western world until the 20th century, and why schizophrenia has become milder in the West during recent decades. […]
Abstract: In the years before the American Civil War, medical observers deemed psychosis to be rare in slaves, but common in free blacks of the North. After 1865, the prevailing psychiatric perception of African Americans was that psychosis was increasing at an alarming rate. Reasons for the increasing rates were initially ascribed to the effects of […]
