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Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification

Herodotus’s enigmatic Scythian theleia nousos/morbus femininus and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages’ tentati...

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Autor principal: Janssen, Diederik F
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8339897/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33855893
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957154X211006253
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author Janssen, Diederik F
author_facet Janssen, Diederik F
author_sort Janssen, Diederik F
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description Herodotus’s enigmatic Scythian theleia nousos/morbus femininus and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages’ tentative 1731 term, melancholia Scytharum. This article identifies pertinent discussions and what turn out to have been entangled, tentative psychologizations in late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth-century mental medicine: of ‘effeminacy of manners’ (mollities animi such as observed in London’s Beaux and mollies) and male homosexuality (amour antiphysique/grec); of the mental masculinity of some women (viragines, Amazones); of ubiquitous attributions of impotence to sorcery (anaphrodisia magica); and lastly, of transfeminine persons encountered throughout the New World and increasingly beyond.
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spelling pubmed-83398972021-08-13 Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification Janssen, Diederik F Hist Psychiatry Articles Herodotus’s enigmatic Scythian theleia nousos/morbus femininus and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages’ tentative 1731 term, melancholia Scytharum. This article identifies pertinent discussions and what turn out to have been entangled, tentative psychologizations in late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth-century mental medicine: of ‘effeminacy of manners’ (mollities animi such as observed in London’s Beaux and mollies) and male homosexuality (amour antiphysique/grec); of the mental masculinity of some women (viragines, Amazones); of ubiquitous attributions of impotence to sorcery (anaphrodisia magica); and lastly, of transfeminine persons encountered throughout the New World and increasingly beyond. SAGE Publications 2021-04-15 2021-09 /pmc/articles/PMC8339897/ /pubmed/33855893 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957154X211006253 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Janssen, Diederik F
Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
title Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
title_full Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
title_fullStr Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
title_full_unstemmed Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
title_short Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
title_sort melancholia scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8339897/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33855893
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957154X211006253
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