“They get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing”*…
From 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.”…
More on this proto-DSM at “Lists of Types of Mania and Melancholy, Compiled for Early–19th-Century Doctors.”
* Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
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As we reach for the Xanax, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Ezra Pound was turned over to the American Army by surrendering Italian forces; Pound, who’d been branded a traitor, was transferred back to the U.S., and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C., where he was imprisoned for 13 years.
A poet who was a major figure of the early modernist movement, Pound was the developer of the “Imagist” school, and the “godfather” of a number of now-well-known contemporaries– among them, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Deeply troubled by the carnage of World War I, Pound moved to Paris, then to Italy in the 1920s, and embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini, whose policies he vocally supported.
While in Army custody, he began work on sections of The Cantos– that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948)– for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress… igniting an enormous controversy.
His release in 1958 was the result of a campaign by writers including Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, and Hemingway. Pound, who was believed to be suffering dementia, returned to Italy.
The best of Pound’s writing – and it is in the Cantos – will last as long as there is any literature.
-Ernest Hemingway
