The Vault

Lists of Types of Mania and Melancholy, Compiled for Early–19th-Century Doctors 

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These lists of types of mania and melancholy appear in the 1817 handbook The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary (available on the Internet Archive, via the U.S. National Library of Medicine). 

This book was edited by John Redman Coxe, a Philadelphia physician, sometime professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and pharmacist. Coxe published several other medical references, including one on smallpox vaccination. (He was a proponent of the practice and vaccinated himself and his infant son in 1801, write the editors of Penn Biographies, “as encouragement for others to do the same.”) 

The book, Coxe wrote in a preface, was meant to be a quick reference for both the novice and the practiced physician, who might need a dictionary “to recal [sic] to his memory the explanation of some medical word.” The reference aimed for complete comprehensiveness, and the advertising copy used to sell the book in England boasted: “We have endeavored to include every Latin and technical term that has ever occurred in the PRACTICE of MEDICINE, SURGERY, PHARMACY, BOTANY, and CHEMISTRY.” 

As such, the book shows how physicians in the early 19th century might have encountered descriptions of mania and melancholy—both familiar words that had been used to identify particular mental states for centuries—in everyday practice.

I first saw these lists on the Tumblr of a user known as Nemfrog, who does a great job of pulling interesting things out of books in the Internet Archive. 

The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary: Containing a Concise Explanation of All the Terms Used in Medicine, Surgery, Pharmacy, Botany, Natural History, Chemistry, and Materia Medica, ed. John Redman Coxe, M.D., 1817. 

Internet Archive. 

The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary: Containing a Concise Explanation of All the Terms Used in Medicine, Surgery, Pharmacy, Botany, Natural History, Chemistry, and Materia Medica, ed. John Redman Coxe, M.D., 1817. 

Internet Archive

The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary: Containing a Concise Explanation of All the Terms Used in Medicine, Surgery, Pharmacy, Botany, Natural History, Chemistry, and Materia Medica, ed. John Redman Coxe, M.D., 1817. 

Internet Archive. 

The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary: Containing a Concise Explanation of All the Terms Used in Medicine, Surgery, Pharmacy, Botany, Natural History, Chemistry, and Materia Medica, ed. John Redman Coxe, M.D., 1817. 

Internet Archive.