title: [Reform of the treatment given to mental health patients in modern Spain].
abstract: Nursing for mental health patients was not born as a field of knowledge but rather as customary practice, that is, it was not born from a theoretical study, as a reflective exercise on the nature of appropriate treatment, but as a violent reaction against human indignity. Using the example of the Portuguese man Juan Ciudad Duarte, known as Saint John of God, the author removes the saintly nature of his man to introduce us to his most human side as a reformer, set in a historical context marked by the humanistic renaissance era and by his territory, the recently conquered Granada. Based on two cultural focuses of the Renaissance, mystical thinking and the disease of melancholy, we can get close to the origin of mental health care in Spain. Not due to a contemplative mysticism, but an active mysticism induces Juan Ciudad to rebel against the established order. Furthermore he does this using the metaphor of madness and madman in an epoch when melancholy was considered to be an evil which possessed the enlightened, a disease which afflicted the reformers, those who had crossed beyond the borders of acceptable behavior and thinking. Through this means, mysticism and melancholic humor became the basic formula which made it culturally possible to renovate the model for treating mental patients in modern Spain.
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Investigación Cualitativa, Fundación Index, Granada.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Amezcua
mesh_terms: D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000266:history / Q000451:nursing; D006676:History of Nursing; D049668:History, 15th Century; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000266:history* / Q000451:nursing; D013030:Spain