Beschreibung:

28; VI; 95 S.; Illustr.; 22 cm. Originalleinen mit Schutzumschlag.

Bemerkung:

Sehr gutes Ex. - Englisch. // Faksimile der Ausgabe London; Hogg; 1892. A.E. Bridger: Depression: What it is and how to cure it. // Text: (Vorwort) M.J. van Lieburg. - Adolphus Edward Bridger (1852-1920) and his popular-scientific treatise on depressions / In the monumental Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeons-General-Office (now the National Library of Medicine), the only subject catalogue of old medical literature, the word 'Depression' only appears in the respective volume of the second series, published in 1899. Whereas reference words such as neurasthenia and melancholy provide a long list of books and journal articles, Bridger's booklet entitled Depression: What it is and how to cure it is the first and sole representative of a subject of literature which in the 20th century was to expand into an impressive bibliography. An unknown monograph on depressions Yet Bridger's booklet is hardly known at all. It is ignored by reference works on the history of psychiatry, and in specialist studies about depressions Bridger's name is never mentioned. The popular-scientific presentation and the one-sided somatic approach to the phenomenon of depression most likely contributed to the obscurity of Bridger's study. The book is certainly a rarity. An extensive search through the great international libraries only produced two (!) copies: one was located at the National Library of Medicine in New York, the other at the library of the Yale University Medical School (New Haven). ? In the preface of the book in question, Bridger personally emphasised once again his pioneering role in the field of literature on the subject of depression. 'From books, save and except from the immortal work of Robert Burton [The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; v.L.) I have learnt nothing,... because there are no books on the subject.' When examining the literature on depressions available from the period preceding the publication of Bridger's book, it becomes quite evident that Bridger's observation calls at least for some subtle modifications. After all, depressions have been described at length for centuries under the general designation of melancholy. Via the writers of the classical antiquity, as well as the physicians of the Renaissance, among them Timothy Bright (1551P-1616) with the first English study of melancholy (A Treatise of Melancholie, containing the causes thereof, London 1586), and via the 18th-century 'systematists', the knowledge of depressive disorders had become in the 19th century the specialistic field of the early representatives of the French and German school of psychiatry. From the French school it was particularly Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840), a student of Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), who was setting the tone. Apart from the multitude of names and the increasingly farther-reaching differentiation of the concept of melancholy ('lypemania', or 'tristimania' and 'monomania'), a practical and clinical orientation was predominant in this school. The dogmatisation of theoretical insights and, above all, the search for neuro-pathological causes was more a characteristic of the German school, led by Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868). ? (Vorwort)