Psychiatry
Were early psychiatric diseases essences?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
The paper traces Christian Wolff’s logic into Boissier de Sauvages’ nosology and shows William Cullen also individuated disease species by a single essential cause.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Early modern psychiatric nosology, via Wolff into Sauvages and Cullen, individuated disease species by a single essential cause.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Inspect source passages
Were early psychiatric diseases essences?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
Sauvages published the first Nosologie méthodique in 1731.
Thus, as Munsche and Whitaker () explain, Sauvages’ published the first version of Nosologie méthodique in 1731, when Linnaeus was a medical student
Linnaeus’s Genera Morborum appeared in 1759.
Linnaeus used this work for his own Genera Morborum of 1759, in which he classified diseases
Key findings
Eighteenth-century physicians lacked a live non-essentialist option. Sauvages mixed brain defects with moral vice. Cullen explained many symptoms by one essence. Historians had underplayed logic and metaphysics.
Methodology
It reads Sauvages’ botanical hierarchy of mental disorders and Cullen’s proximate-cause method against present debates on natural kinds and the DSM.
Limitations
This is intellectual history of two nosologists, not a defence of essentialism for today’s DSM. It does not reclassify living patients.
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.