Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 102-104. (Budapest, 1983)

TANULMÁNYOK - Birtalan Győző: A felvilágosodás mentálhygiénéje külföldön és Magyarországon

the Church had provided for the inner life. In the background of general psychologic interest there lay the new exciting experience of recognizing the self. Subjectivity and the broad scale of feelings it opened up was expressed and spread by sentimental literature and by music much enriched in its means of expression. The harmful influence of early capitalism on mass psychology was first perceived in the home of this historic process, England. British physicians complained as early as the end of the 17th century about the accumulation of hypochondria. Sydenham diagnosed one-sixth of his patients as hysterics. Cheyne deemed that one-third of his patients suffered from nervous disease. He called this group of functional ailments as the "English malady" in 1733. The author presents certain contemporary works treating the characteristics and possible causes of the above mentioned pathologic symptoms. Th. Arnold emphasized the health risks of English business life. He attributed the symptoms of the stresses caused by concurrence, the unhealthy ways of urban life, among others to excessive tea and coffee drinking and gambling. He also tried to explain why these clinical pictures were more frequent with the English than with the French and referred to differences in lifestyle, temperament and intensity of religious life. The growing number of suicides was a much treated problem at that time. J. Chr. Reil, when classifying the types of melancholia, took the English variant as a type of its own having no direct and concrete cause just spleen. Hufeland explained the epidemic of suicide with the frequent changes of environment, alcoholism, and the speeded rhythm of life. Contemporary medical literature spoke much about the unbridled pleasure-hunting, the uncritical affinity to novelty, the loosening of moral bounds, about dehumanizing tendencies in general. Private disappointments, public conflicts, disillusionment of empty formalism of social life, aversions to society could all justify and explain for the withdrawal of the alienated man with his hurt psyche. The advocates of seclusion could refer to old classical examples, but in the decades of the Enlightenment, in the period of philantrophic social programs, this rejecting attitude had to find a new sort of justification. J. G. Zimmermann wrote a monography on this subject. He started from the thought that for sensitive people the solitude is not only a necessity but a duty. It is in solitude that the spheres of intellect, will and sentiment grow in strength. This seclusion had of course different motives than that of the self-mortificating anachorètes and ascetics. Many of the medical men of the Enlightenment and Romanticism analyzed the excesses of sentimental, artistic manners, pathetic sorrows and sensibilities, much spread and having great influence among the circle of intellectual youth. These pathologic manifestations

—following the appearance of Goethe's "Werther"

—were received rather critically by medical and lay men of sound instinct. In the 1830s the depression of the youth in defeated France was described by Musset as the malady of the century. The characteristic state of mind of this generation

—manipulated also by contemporary literature

—in Europe at large was melancholia and hypochondria. The increase of the knowledge on medical psychology in the last two decades of the 18th century hastened the rise of two medical disciplines, the development of psychiatry and mental hygiene. Out of the history of evolution of contemporary psychiatry this paper deals only with the main traits of the pathologic concept and clinical practice of the Paris avantgárdé trend, headed by Pinel and Esquirol. The author points out the outstanding professional results and deeply humanist character of this trend. The development of mental hygiene in Hungary is presented here through the related writings of two excellent Hungarian experts, István Kibédi Mátyus and Mihály Lenhossék, Senior. István Kibédi Mátyus {1725—1802), chief medical officer (physicus) of Küküllő county was the writer of the first health book in the Hungarian language. Its brief version called "Dietetics" was published between 1762 and 1766. The second, much longer version came out in six volumes between 1787 and 1793 under the title "Old and New Diatetics". Both dietetic works have the same structure, treating one after the other the subjects of air, food and drink, motion and recréa-