ABSTRACT
Mysticism, which spread especially through Germany and France but gained some ground throughout Europe, created a new and mysterious pseudo-scientific atmosphere which prepared the way for impostors and adventurers. The medical systems of the eighteenth century naturally reflect the influence of all the tendencies toward reform arising from the Aristotelian doctrine of the preceding centuries. Partisan of the healing powers of nature, Friedrich Hoffmann maintained that farmers got well better and quicker without the medical care that was available to the inhabitants of cities. Psychiatry as a separate branch of medicine, before which time the care of mental patients had been entirely custodial; they were treated in the most barbarous fashion, kept in chains, and abandoned to the treatment of the ignorant and the cruel. Valsalva had made a beginning in combating this mode of treatment and showed himself a precursor of the now well-established principle of “no restraint.”
