Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Pneuma psychikon

  • The pineal: seat of the soul

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom The pineal for millennia had been a structure of mystery. In Ancient Egyptian culture, The Eye of Horus was a sign of prosperity and protection, often referred to as the third eye. In Ayurvedic physiology it corresponds to the sixth chakra—Ajna, located in the middle of the forehead, representing intelligence,…

  • The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes

    JMS PearceHull, England “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 mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…