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Darrera modificació: 2014-04-20
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Horden, Peregrine, "Responses to possession and insanity in the earlier Byzantine world", Social History of Medicine, 6/2 (1993), 177-194.
- Resum
- This paper challenges the assumption that exorcism was the most common resolution of demonic possession in the earlier Byzantine world. It concentrates first on the seventh-century Life of St Theodore of Sykeon, and it proposes that, in Byzantium as elsewhere, possession functioned as an idiom that could be applied in a wider variety of conditions than those usually associated with exorcism. These conditions obviously included insanity. A second assumption which the paper challenges is, however, that in Byzantium mental illnesses were nearly always diagnosed in terms of possession. Not only doctors but ‘lay' people as well were quite capable of distinguishing possession from insanity. Indeed, ‘anti–possession', the refusal of the idiom, may have been a common phenomenon. For many of those thought to be possessed, as also for the insane, a number of fates other than exorcism were therefore likely: being chained up or imprisoned, staying at a shrine for a lengthy period, living ‘rough' on the streets – and, not least, being hospitalized. The contrast between Byzantine hospitals, which supposedly did not accept the possessed or the mentally ill, and Islamic ones, which became virtually equivalent to lunatic asylums, has perhaps been overdrawn.
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Medicina - Psicologia i psiquiatria
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