VIRUS Band 13, pp. 199-213, 2020/07/23
Schwerpunkt: Alternative und komplementäre Heilmethoden in der Neuzeit
This article intends to analyse the social perception and the diversity of (alternative) medical treatments of mental illness in both Medieval and Early Modern Times. Therefore two medical reports and two different types of medical recipes, taken from the Codices Palatini germanici, were analysed. One of the examples contains a so called “pathography”, the other example includes therapy recommendations. Instead of focusing on retrospective diagnoses, it is even more important to find out which therapeutic or medical treatments were used and why. The main problem was to precisely define the term “alternative medicine” in the investigated timeframe.
Keywords: Disability, impairment, mental diseases, social perception, alternative medicine, medical treatment, Early Modern Age, Middle Ages, German-speaking area
