Posted by gary (208.133.217.152) on January 21, 2000 at 17:40:42:
excerpt from medical historian at Wellcome"
"Alongside the physical damage, psychiatrists have long urged upon the harm reading could also do to your mind. For one thing, it encouraged hypochondria. In his Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730), the aformentioned Bernard Mandeville laid bare the psychopathology of print through a dialogue between a physician, Philopirio, and his patient, Misomedon.
Misomedon relates his sad history. A well-bred gentleman, he ruined his constitution by ‘good living’. He then consulted a gaggle of learned physicians but none of their treatments worked. Convinced he was sinking from every sickness known to scholars, he developed ‘a mind to study Physick’ himself – but his studies merely made bad worse, until finally he persuaded himself that he had the pox – ‘when I grew better, I found that all this had been occasion’d by reading of the Lues, when I began to be ill; which has made me resolve since never to look in any Book of Physick again, but when my head is in very good order’."
for complete article (fascinating) go to:
http://www.historytoday.com/today/0398/feature/index.stm