ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Pinel's and Esquirol's views on the passions as causes and cures of insanity in the wider context of ideas about the curability of the insane. In the clinical notes that Pinel wrote about the insane patients he was able to interview, he referred to the personal circumstances and events that might explain their insanity. Pinel went beyond his predecessors and contemporaries in raising public awareness about the role of emotional factors in mental health, and in advocating the understanding of the passions as part of the training of the medical staff offering state-funded therapeutic interventions. Pinel helped to transform public hospices into therapeutic institutions by proving that a significant proportion of the paupers who were furiously insane or who were 91too fearful to even want to eat could regain their sanity and become citizens able to work. Pinel is widely recognized for having laid the foundations of scientific psychiatry.
