Publisher's Synopsis
Most of the prefatory issues are extensively elaborated upon in the Prolegomenon, which also contains the complete references to the texts and authors discussed below. Nevertheless, the "Preface" would be grossly incomplete without touching on some of these issues, books, and scholars. Too, many of this book's chapters (e. g. , Mora's, Marx's, D. B. Weiner's) examine and "reference" important earlier, as well as contemporary, general histories of psychiatry and specialized monographs; in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Also, in his 1968 Short History of Psychiatry, d- cussed below, Ackerknecht (pp. xi-xii) references important nineteenth and earlier-twentieth century psychiatric histories in English, French, and German. Such citations will of course not be repeated here. Finally, thanks to several publishers're-editions of dozens of classical psychiatric texts; one can consult their bibliographies as well. See "Prolegomenon" for references to these splendid series. In a rough-and-ready sense, medical history began in classical Greece-for example, On Ancient Medicine. While traditionally included in the Hippocratic corpus, this text seems more likely to have been written by a non- or even anti-Hippocratic doctor. Moreover, the Hippocratic and other schools were hardly as secular as we now suppose. On Epilepsy, for example, does not so much declare the prevalent denotation of it as the "sacred disease" erroneous as it does that it is no more nor less sacred than any other disease.
