Madness in Civilization: From the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

by Andrew Scull,
Psychology Today, June 2, 2015

The practitioners of Hippocratic medicine maintained that madness had “natural” causes. “My own view,” one of them wrote, “is that those who first attributed a sacred character to this malady were like the mages, purifiers, charlatans and quacks of our own day, men who claim great piety and superior knowledge. Being at a loss and having no treatment that would help, they concealed and sheltered themselves behind the divine.”