ABSTRACT
“Madness” is a word that has been around for a very long time, and has been differently expressed as insanity, lunacy, mental derangement, and “melancholy”. In his sixteenth-century Treatise of Melancholie, Timothy Bright wrote of mental disorders which begin with the presence of melancholic symptoms. In his book, he speaks about “a disposition of the mind altered from reason or else a humour of the body […] this humour is of two sorts: natural or unnatural […]”. Obviously, Bright was still influenced by Hippocrates’ concepts of “humours” (i.e., temperaments) and about the consciousness of sin related to the religious system of values of his time. When he speaks about “humour”, he speaks about melancholic darkness (“dark thick bile”).
