Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind

Benjamin Rush

• Publisher: Bonhopai Books
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781779794130

Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind by Benjamin Rush stands as one of the earliest and most influential works in the history of psychiatry — a pioneering attempt to understand mental illness not as moral failing or spiritual corruption, but as a medical condition rooted in the human body and capable of treatment. First published in 1812, this landmark volume transformed the study of mental health in America and helped establish Rush as the nation's first true psychiatrist.

Written with both scientific curiosity and humane conviction, the book explores a wide range of conditions — from melancholy, mania, and derangement to phobias, delusions, and moral insanity — treating each with the analytical precision of a physician and the compassion of a reformer. Rush's approach was revolutionary for its time: he insisted that patients deserved care, not chains; that mental disorders arose from physical and environmental causes; and that healing must address both body and spirit.

Beyond its medical insights, Diseases of the Mind reflects the Enlightenment faith in progress and human dignity. Rush saw the physician's task as moral as well as scientific — to restore reason, comfort, and hope. His descriptions of early therapeutic methods, his reflections on the influence of emotion and habit, and his insistence on humane treatment anticipated the principles of modern psychology and psychiatry.

 More than a historical curiosity, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind remains a cornerstone in the evolution of mental health care — a document of courage, intellect, and compassion from the dawn of medical science. 

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE.
• CHAPTER I.—Of the Faculties and Operations of the Mind, and on the Proximate Cause and Seat of Intellectual Derangement.
• CHAPTER II.—Of the remote and existing causes of intellectual derangement.
• CHAPTER III.—Of Partial Intellectual Derangement, and particularly of Hypochondriasis.
• CHAPTER IV.—Of the Remedies for Hypochondriasis or Tristimania.
• CHAPTER IV.—Of Amenomania, or the second form of Partial Intellectual Derangement.
• CHAPTER V.—Of General Intellectual Derangement.
• CHAPTER VII.—Of the Remedies of Mania.
• CHAPTER VII. — II. Of Manicula.
• CHAPTER VIII. — III. Of Manalgia.
• CHAPTER IX.—Of Demence, or Dissociation.
• CHAPTER X.—On Derangement in the Will.
• CHAPTER XI.—Of Derangement in the Principle of Faith, or the Believing Faculty.
• CHAPTER XII.—Of Derangement in the Memory.
• CHAPTER XIII.—Of Fatuity.
• CHAPTER XIV.—Of Dreaming, Incubus, or Night Mare, and Somnambulism.
• CHAPTER XV.—Of Illusions.
• CHAPTER XVI.—Of Revery, or Absence of Mind.
• CHAPTER XVII.—On Derangement of the Passions.
• CHAPTER XVIII.—Of the Morbid State of the Sexual Appetite.
• CHAPTER XIX.—Of Derangement in the Moral Faculties.