The first modern textbook of psychiatry

ESQUIROL, Jean Etienne Dominique.

Des maladies mentales considerées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-legal ... Accompagees de 27 planches gravees.

Brussels: chez J.-B. Balliere, 1838.

1st Edition. Soft cover. Near Fine. Item #001845

Des maladies mentales considerées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-legal ... Accompagees de 27 planches gravees. Paris, London, Leipzig: chez J.-B. Balliere, 1838 [edition Bruxelles]. 4to. 2 volumes of text (240x159 mm); 1 atlas volume of plates (225x148 mm). vi, [2], 393 [3]; vi, 380 pp. including half titles, atlas with 27 engraved plates by Ambroise Tardieu [26] or Le Blanc [1], one plate folding, each plate with a manuscript caption below. Original gray publishers wrappers (paper cracked and chipped at spine), pages untrimmed and partially unopened, light foxing to text and plates, occasional minor soiling and browning of leave margins, old library stamp to titles of text volumes, old paper shelf mark labels to spine of text volumes. Provenance: Library of Jesuit Seminary, Lyon ("Sem. Prov. Lug. S.J. Bibl. Prof."). An excellent, unsophisticated and wide-margined copy of the rare Brussels printing, unusual in this state with the original wrappers present. -----

Garrison-Morton 4929; cf. Heirs of Hippocrates 766 (Brussels imprint); Hunter-Macalpine pp.731-738; Norman 726; cf. Waller 2817; Wellcome II, p.531. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST MODERN TEXTBOOK OF PSYCHIATRY. This is the much rarer Brussels edition printed in smaller font size and published at the same time as the Paris-London-Leipzig printing (with no priority of issue established). In this comprehensive work, Esquirol, the most eminent pupil of the pioneer Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), "summarized the experience gained over a lifetime of observation and treatment of mental illness' pioneered the use of statistical methods for studies of insanity, and established an accurate terminology and a careful typology of the various forms of mental illness, all based on clinical observations. "He was the first to distinguish between hallucinations and illusions, and between dementia and idiocy; he also provided the classic definition of paresis, coined the term 'monomania' (a concept foreshadowing the modern view of schizophrenia) and distinguished certain depressive states ('lypemanias') from other psychoses" (Norman). The delicately engraved plates which constitute the atlas depict various mental patients (whose illness is specified in the table of plates).

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