Statistics, Classification, and the Standardisation of Melancholia

Abstract

This chapter situates melancholia in the context of the administrative framework that was constructed in British asylum medicine from the 1840s onward. In the last quarter of the century, the interaction between administrative and statistical practices and a theoretical framework based on physiological psychology, produced melancholia as an increasingly standardised disease category with a clear symptomatology. This thematic chapter maps in detail the historical trajectory of what emerged as the main features of biomedical melancholia in the late nineteenth century: mental pain, depression, religious delusions, and suicidal tendencies. The chapter demonstrates the different and complex historical roots of these symptom categories, showing that they were made into features of melancholia in very different ways, none of which were inevitable or straightforward.