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History of Psychiatry
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`Essay on a classification of different genera of insanity' by J. Baillarger (1853)

G.E. Berrios

Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Addenbrooke's Hospital (Box 189), Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, UK. Email: geb11{at}cam.ac.uk

Less well known than some of his contemporaries, Jules Baillarger (1809—90) tends to be celebrated by `who said it first' writers as the man who assisted the `birth of bipolar disorder'. This view is based on the anachronistic claim that Baillarger's `insanity with a double form', Kraepelin's `das manisch-depressive Irresein', Leonhard's concept of Bipolarität and DSM-IV's `Bipolar I and Bipolar II' Disorder somehow constitute an incremental approximation to the same `disease'. Baillarger is important because he was a high profile conceptual interlocutor in the great 19-century debates on hallucinations, hypochondria, language disorders, General Paralysis of the Insane, cretinism and goitre. Classic Text No. 75 is a translation of Baillarger's important 1853 paper on the classification of madness, and it is a good illustration of the popular method of top-to-bottom psychiatric taxonomy. Written before psychiatrists felt the need to conceal the theoretical nature of the exercise behind a farrago of `empirical evidence', it shows how hidden assumptions govern the way in which the boundaries of mental disorders are actually drawn.

Key Words: Baillarger • classification • concepts • France • mental disorder • psychiatry • taxonomy • top-to-bottom • 19th century

History of Psychiatry, Vol. 19, No. 3, 358-373 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X08092618
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