No doubt it was a dreadful misfortune when some member of a family became insane, but this terrible calamity, which nothing could make one anticipate or avoid, was happily exceptional, like thunderbolts.  The other men and even the members of the family presented nothing similar and regarded themselves with pride as very different to this wretched being transformed into a beast.  This victim of heavenly curse was pitied, settled comfortably in a nice pavilion at Bloomingdale and never more spoken of.  People still preserve on this point ideas similar to those they had formerly about tuberculosis, known only under the form of terrible but exceptional pulmonary consumption.  Now it has at last been understood that there are slight tuberculoses, curable, but tremendously frequent.  It will be the same with mental disorders; one day it will be recognized that under diverse forms, more or less attenuated they exist to-day on all sides, among a crowd of individuals that one does not feel inclined to consider as insane.

Little by little, in fact, men have had to state with astonishment that all lunatics were not at Bloomingdale.  Outside the hospital, in the family of the unfortunate lunatic, or even in other groups, one observed strange complaints, moanings relating to lesions which were not visible, inability to move notwithstanding the apparent integrity of the organs, contradictory and incomprehensible affirmations; in one word, abnormal behaviors, very different to normal behaviors, regularized by the laws and by reason.

What was the meaning of these queer behaviors?  At first they were very badly understood; they were supposed to have some connection with being possessed (with the devil), with miasmata, vapors, unlikely perturbations of the body and animal spirits that circulated in the nerves.  One spoke, as did still Prof.  Pomme at the end of the eighteenth century, “of the shrivelling up of the nerves."[14] But above all, one preserved the conviction that these queer disorders were very different to the mental disorders of lunacy.  These peculiar individuals had, it was said, all their reason; they remained capable of understanding their fellow creatures and of being understood by them; they were not to be expelled from society like the poor lunatics; therefore their illness should be anything but the mental disorders of lunacy.

Physicians, as it is just, watched their patients and only confirmed their opinion by fine scientific theories.  They christened these new disorders by the name of neuroses, reserving the name of psychoses for the mental disorders of lunatics.  During the whole of the nineteenth century the radical division of neuroses and psychoses was accepted as a dogma; on the one side, one described epilepsies, hysterias, neurasthenias; on the other, one studied manias, melancholias, paranoias, dementias, without preoccupying oneself in the least with the connections those very ill-defined disorders might have the ones with the others.