Keywords
Disease
Pathologies
Abstract
Today the focus of madness - the way to understand it, to treat it and to look at it - is no longer the same as in previous centuries. In Ancient Greece, the madman was socially considered a person with divine powers. What he said was heard as an important and necessary knowledge, capable even of modifying events, interfering in the destinies of men.
It is believed that the enigmatic (indeed incomprehensible) phrases they uttered approached men from the orders of the gods who inhabited Olympus. In this period, madness finds space to express itself, not having to be controlled or excluded, since, transformed by culture, it becomes a necessary instrument for the understanding of the divine messages.
In the Middle Ages, marked by plague, leprosy and fear of innumerable threats from this and the "other world," madness was seen as an expression of the forces of nature, as something non-human. Again, men believed that the incomprehensible speech of the foolish meant that they came in contact with the entrails and thus understood their mysteries, heard the truth of the world. Madness is then exalted. But concomitantly, there were the feelings of terror and attraction brought about by something that inspires fear: the insane.