. 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. This division was accentuated by the organization of the
studies and the treatment of the patients. The houses that received the
neurotic patients and the insane were absolutely distinct. The
physicians who attended the ones and the others were different, and even
supplied by different competitions. In France, even now, the recruiting
of asylum house pupils and hospital house pupils, the recruiting of
asylum doctors and that of hospital doctors, give an opportunity for
different competitions. One might almost say that these two categories
of house pupils and doctors have quite a different edu