The bonds of saturn: Psychomotor retardation in renaissance writings on melancholia Meeting Abstract

  


Author: Widmer, D. A. J.
Abstract Title: The bonds of saturn: Psychomotor retardation in renaissance writings on melancholia
Meeting Title: 31st Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Abstract: The recent move back to the biology of psychomotor dysfunction in depression only echoes centuries-old writings on the centrality of movement changes in these conditions. Renaissance records regarding melancholia clearly show that the inhibition of mental and bodily activity was key to the symptomatology of this depression-like syndrome. This work will explore Renaissance descriptions of psychomotor dysfunction, the aspect that epitomized melancholia in the minds of contemporaries because of the truth of the tortures of physical paralysis that it portrayed. The debilitating effects of psychomotor dysfunction are severe for an individual; how doubly so when the depressed sufferer is responsible for others: family, pupils, subjects. A portrayal of the power of melancholia's powerlessness can be found in commentaries on the descendants of Spain's Catholic Monarchs Fernando and Isabel, whose health was meant to serve as a model for the populace. Renaissance society looked to their princely family for guidance and anxiety over a ruler's incapacitation runs through contemporary correspondence and chronicles. The writings of Renaissance royals were chosen not only for the relative wealth of extant records, but also to highlight the serious effects of the person's symptoms on family members and subjects alike. While an inheritance factor for melancholia has been alternatively supported and refuted since Antiquity, the belief in the potency of inheritance has acted, and still acts, as a powerful stressor on descendants of a melancholy tree. These effects were only compounded by the responsibility to which these melancholics were born.
Keywords: inheritance; meeting abstract; renaissance writings; neuroscience history; fernando; monarch; isabel
Journal Title: Society for Neuroscience Abstracts
Volume: 27
Issue: 1
Meeting Dates: 2001 Nov 10-15
Meeting Location: San Diego, CA
ISSN: 0190-5295
Publisher: Society for Neuroscience  
Date Published: 2001-01-01
Start Page: 37
Language: English
ACCESSION: BCI:BCI200100486474
PROVIDER: biosis
Notes: Meeting Abstract: 22.20 -- Source: Biosis