Paranoiæ

The author had never been able to hypnotize an insane patient, and in the paranoiæ the practice had filled these patients full of delusions.

The memory for matters that they think about constantly, or, as I might term it, the circumscribed memory, is very acute, as it is in the paranoiæ.

Just what led [Rudolf Augustin] Vogel to pick up the term paranoia is not apparent. This was in 1772. He employs it in two ways. In the first place as synonymous with insanity as a whole—for we note that the science of mental disease still hung on to the unitary idea of all of these psychoses as one—a belief, strange to say, advocated by many English psychiatrists at the present day—but Vogel here spoke of the paranoiæ, in the plural, and then we find him trying to create more or less specific trends among the psychoses—a tendency which was largely due to the stimulus given by the work of Linnæus in natural history.

There is a distinct group, however, in which persecutory complexes form the presenting and overriding feature, and these will now be described under the heading of the paranoiæ.