MAY TIME CAPSULE

1586

On May 23, Timothie Bright, the physician of London's St. Bartholomew's Hospital, wrote the forward to his book, "Treatise on Melancholy"--the first book in the English language on mental illness. Some of the phrases Bright used in his descriptions of disordered behavior appeared later in William Shakespeare's plays.

For example, in discussing the best circumstances for people experiencing sadness, Bright writes, "The [air] for melancholike folke [sic] ought to be thinne [sic], pure and subtile [sic], open and patent to all winds: in respect of their temper, especially to the south and southeast." Shakespeare's Hamlet later says to Guildenstern, "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

1766

On May 27, Franz Anton Mesmer published his thesis titled "De Planetarum Influxu," in which he proposed a relationship between the magnetic forces of the planets and the human nervous system. Mesmer earned his MD from the University of Vienna in this same year and went on to develop a practice based on the manipulation of magnetic forces or "Mesmerism."

1927

On May 2, in the Carrie Buck case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia statute allowing sexual sterilization of institutionalized individuals suffering from "hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

1978

On May 3, California became the first state to grant hospital staff privileges to psychologists. State Senator Paul Carpenter, a psychologist, wrote the legislation, which was signed by Governor Jerry Brown.

Source: APA Historical Database, created and maintained by Warren R. Street, Central Washington University, and published as "A Chronology of Noteworthy Events in American Psychology" (APA, 1994).



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