Tag: Historian
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Edward Gibbon’s decline and fall
The author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was fifty-two years old when “after the completion of a toilsome and successful work” he set about writing his autobiography. “Truth, naked and unblushing” was to be his exposition, the style simple, though the long habit of correct writing might have produced an “appearance…
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The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Portrait of Philippe Pinel by Anna Mérimée. 1826. Public domain. From Wikimedia. “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.” -George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of…