[Atkinson explores the influence of Agrippa's ideas in the formation of attitudes toward the treatment of mentally ill patients.]

Only in recent years has man been able to banish a fear of the unseen which for thousands of years had kept him in perpetual torment. Everywhere about him in the long ago were disembodied spirits, evil, malicious, and cunning. Invisible forms, lurking in every shadow, were thought to be ready to hurl at him some great and terrible misfortune. From the storm reached the outstretched hands of the denizens of the unseen world, and malignant spirits, bent upon his undoing, leered at him from the lightning's flash. Witches with burning eyes cast malevolent glances from the darkness as they swung through the air on unholy errands bent, and salamanders, wreathing and hissing in the flames, set the sparks flying vehemently across his hearth.

Every calamity that had befallen friend or neighbor was believed to have been the culmination of the malicious design of some abominable demon. It was thought that life itself would soon have suffered a frightful termination but for the guardianship of the friendly spirits who waged a perpetual warfare against the innumerable monsters of the air.

Such beliefs were as real to the medieval mind as are the phantoms conjured up today by the imagination of the child. When we recall the visions which sometimes accompanied our childish nocturnal adventures, when every lurking shadow held a possible enemy, we can realize something of the paralyzing terror of these mental children of the past whose paths were so beset with the creatures of their imaginations. The existence of these apparitions was rarely doubted. A great fabric of evidence was at hand to prove the prevalence of such enemies of the human race. Hundreds of persons believed that they had met these demons face to face, and thousands more were thought to have gone down to untimely deaths at their hands.

During certain phases of the moon these enemies of mankind were thought to be particularly hostile, and at such times their frenzy could be allayed only by seizing upon a victim. The bodies of the seized then became the habitats of these dreaded personalities, and the resulting symptoms, which we now know to have been insanity, were but the reflected conduct of the Evil One himself. We have an illustration of this tradition in the word "epilepsy," which we get from the Greek and which literally means "seizing."

It was argued by medical men of the time that moonlight was a factor in producing disturbed mentality, because it gave the demon sufficient light to pursue his nefarious work. An echo of this delusion comes down to us in our English word "lunatic," from luna, the moon, a term used by the old masters of medicine to designate any mental departure from the normal. It was thought the moon also had the power to create physical ills and its debilitating rays were often the cause of death. It was known that the moon influenced the tides, and it was thought that at the turning of the tide death often hovered over the sickbed. We have a reminder of this weird superstition in the case of Shakespeare's Falstaff.

During this period of human history physical disorders were nearly always attributed to spirits who had evaded the protecting sylphs and forced an entrance into the body. Failing in life to accomplish their ends, it was believed, they often succeeded in getting control of the disembodied soul after death. To frighten away these unwelcome neighbors, bells were rung at nightfall. This was the origin of the curfew. As Professor Henry Draper suggests, the bells today given to children as toys had a medieval significance very different from the modern. At that time they were put into the child's hands not to afford him amusement but to act as a safeguard to his life. If these childish beliefs had not been accompanied by acts of supposed retribution, the history of this time would be of interest to us today only as an amusing study in psychology. Instead of this it gives us the most appalling examples of cruelty known to the world.

As already noted, a common belief during the Middle Ages was that of demoniacal possession of the living. Many persons, it was thought, were in league with the devil, the archenemy of mankind. Possessed persons were accused of making storms at sea, of being responsible for periods of drought, of causing hailstorms, of stunting the growth of children, and of a thousand other impossible crimes. Because of this superstition thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffered the most excruciating tortures. They were suspended to ceilings by their thumbs, famished in dungeons, stretched on the rack, and broken on the wheel. Only in death which left them beyond the reach of their tormentors were they to find deliverance. So fearful was the torture which usually preceded the executions of these victims that a great many confessed themselves guilty of the most impossible deeds. Accused persons were known to have admitted that they had caused children to vomit crooked pins, that they had inhabited the bodies of wild animals at night and were enabled thereby to commit the most diabolical acts. Thousands confessed themselves guilty of witchcraft, knowing that such a confession meant death.

The psychology of these confessions has long been a subject of mystery. It is probable that they were made in the hope of a few minutes surcease from pain or as a means of ending an unbearable existence. Some, no doubt, confessed because the terror occasioned by their accusation drove them insane. It is estimated by Samuel Laing that during the eighth century in German alone, over one hundred thousand persons suffered excruciating deaths for the crime of maintaining an alliance with the devil….

In the treatment of the mentally deranged, as in all other things, we find the hand of evolution. By this process the execution of the insane gradually gave way to punishment without death. For centuries these unfortunates were starved, exorcised, and seared with hot irons, under the belief that the demons would find their bodies such an uncomfortable abode that they would vacate the premises for a more agreeable residence. Gradually several of these methods of punishment were supplanted by a therapeutic method with which medical history abounds for centuries. This remedial agent was the whip. So great was the belief in its merit that, until a century and a half ago, it was dispensed to the great as well as the lowly….

Another method of dealing with victims diabolically possessed was "torture insomnia," the subjects of mental disorder being kept continuously awake. No form of treatment could so successfully have defeated its own end. Sleep is as necessary to the human body as food is. It is only while we sleep that brain repair goes on. During our waking hours something which may be called brain waste is stored up within us and if not eliminated by sleep will, of itself, destroy our reason. Is it a wonder that none recovered? Even if mildly insane, the victim was chained to a stake in an upright position and all the devices of perverted ingenuity were used to keep him awake. The inevitable was the result. What would have been a temporary disorder under rational treatment became a hopeless disease.

In 1486, a time when the infamy and horror so long directed toward the insane was at its peak, a child was born at Cologne who was to cross swords with the swarming myriads of ghouls and infesting spirits, and whose influence, sweeping down through the centuries, was to be the means of banishing them forever from the world. This child was Henry Cornelius Agrippa.

Agrippa was a favored son of Cologne. He lived at a time when the ninety and nine were born into feudalism, were ill-nourished, half-clothed, and poorly housed serfs whose ceaseless toil went to maintain an aristocracy and to support a brutal military employed to keep them in bondage. Agrippa, of the one per cent which history is pleased to call noble ancestry, was destined to throw away his birthright in the hope of bringing to a close the orgies of superstition and inhumanity toward the insane which so long had cursed his country. He was further destined to grope his way alone through a maze of intolerance and ignorance, maligned, opposed, and suspected. And, as a friend of the oppressed, he was to meet with a persecution that was to end only with his death.

Agrippa's accident of birth gave him the opportunity of a liberal education, which, by the way, in medieval times consisted largely in storing the mind with mistakes and studying in detail various and sundry events which had never happened. The universities turned out an insipid product taught to conform, whose thoughts followed the beaten path of convention. This, however, seems not to have affected Agrippa.

By some Agrippa is believed to have graduated from the University of Cologne. Others say that he was expelled. At any rate he carried away from his university a salutary ambition to hew out a name for himself. What appeared to be a channel to this end was soon open. The court of Emperor Maximilian I was in need of a secretary. He could fill the requirements from the standpoint of both blood and education, so he applied and was duly installed; but his new post brought him only disillusionment, and soon he left, disgusted with the jealousy and frippery of court life. In 1509 he studied divinity at the University of Dôle, in Burgundy, and later became its professor of Hebrew. Here his utterances against the popular belief in witchcraft made him enemies, but he worked on, patiently and aggressively, ever ready to strike with his caustic pen at wrongs which for centuries had been blighting humanity. Later he took up the study of medicine. He received his degree in 1515, after which he traveled in France and England.

In 1518 Agrippa became the syndic at Metz. Here he was appalled at the treatment of the insane, who were either confined in dismal and repulsive quarters or languished in the most wretched dungeons. Incurable cases wore an iron belt about their bodies with a ring attached, through which ran an upright bar. They could sit and stand, but this unhappy contrivance prevented their lying down. In this way they were doomed to spend their miserable lives. The prisons for the insane had no drainage and no proper ventilation. Disinfection was unknown. Shut away from the sunlight, eating improper food, and drinking contaminated water, they soon sickened and died. Two or three years was the average life of an inmate.

Agrippa began to advocate the treatment of the insane with humane methods and sought to prove that the padded cell was more efficacious than the iron collar and chain then used on nearly all cases. Contending that the prevalent superstition as applied to the insane was fatal to even a moderately disturbed intellect, and impatient at the credulity of his contemporaries and the cruelties which their ignorance encouraged, he resolved at any cost to hew a path through this jungle of popular superstition.

One day a demented old woman was dragged through the streets, having been accused of witchcraft. Agrippa made an impassioned plea in her defense, upholding the view that the supposed witches were really victims of disease of the brain and that they should be treated with mercy instead of abuse. The result of this innovation was inevitable; he was openly denounced by the medical profession, his friends forsook him, and soon the mob was at his heels. Savan, the Inquisitor of Metz, was preparing to bring him before the Inquisition for disturbing a popular belief, when he fled the city. To remain would have meant death at the stake, the inevitable fate of those of the time whose personalities were not lost in conformity, or whose characters were not dominated by submission to authority.

Agrippa was still essentially an aristocrat, and in 1523 at Lyons he was made court physician to Louis of Savoy. But he was not long to enjoy peace. His enemies began their intrigues anew, and he was repaid for his services by being banished. His compensation was withheld and he again found himself a penniless wanderer. In 1528 he was once more a court physician, this time to Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, at Antwerp. Here he wrote his book, On the Vanity of the Sciences. This work was a general condemnation of the medical science of the time, in which the part played by the medical profession in promoting the witchcraft delusion and its resulting cruelty to the insane was set forth in scathing language. His ideas on insanity, embodied in this book, may be considered the nucleus around which has grown the science of psychiatry.

Soon after the publication of Agrippa's work he was imprisoned in Brussels. After a year he was released and returned to Lyons, where he was again thrown into prison. In the year 1535 at Grenoble, France, the great humanitarian, with a broken heart and a body wasted with disease, succumbed to an acute illness. Much prison life had done for him that from which he had given so much of his life to save others.

In 1816 Philippe Pinel at the risk of his liberty instituted the reforms which Agrippa sought to bring about nearly three hundred years earlier. Pinel succeeded in striking off the chains of insane prisoners, liberating them from close and musty cells and placing them in humane surroundings. Thus was the dream of Agrippa to become a reality.

[Agrippa] was the first man in history to strike a blow in favor of the persecuted insane. Since that time all advocates for reform in the treatment of the mentally diseased have but followed the footsteps of this great physician, humanitarian, and searcher after truth.