Melancholia and partial insanity.
In the medical literature of the eighteenth century melancholia came to be defined as partial insanity. Seventeenth-century English law introduced the term and influenced later forensic concerns about the concept. But the history of melancholia reveals a gradual development of such a concept of limited derangement associated with the delusions usually cited in accounts of this disease. In the early nineteenth century the relationship of melancholia and this concept weakened and was gradually abandoned, the content of the syndrome of melancholia was reduced, and out of this complex process emerged the notion of monomania.
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D003702:Delusions / Q000266:history; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000266:history*; D004739:England; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049711:History, Modern 1601-; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000266:history*; D009626:Terminology as Topic