BAYLE - Traité des maladies du Cerveau… - 182... Lot n° 1011

Treatise on Diseases of the Brain and its Membranes  Mental illnesses In-8, rubbed havana half calf, flat spine with gold threads, blunt corners, Paris, Gabon, 1826, 596 pages. Spine faded, scattered freckles. First edition of this classic on paralytic dementia, development and deepening of the author's thesis published in 1822. Rare. Initially a second volume was planned but never published. "In 1822, BAYLE defended his thesis "Research on Mental Illness" in which he described a state of dementia with incomplete general paralysis which marks an essential period in the history of psychiatry. It is the anatomoclinical description of chronic arachnitis, this general paralysis, which is of interest to Research on Mental Illness, although it is only the first part of it. J. Haslam had, in 1798, first drawn attention to the symptoms of this affection, but it is to Bayle's credit that he definitively established the picture on the basis of six clinical observations followed by anatomical controls collected in Royer-Collard's department. He establishes a specific correlation between arachnoid alterations, incomplete general paralysis and a disturbance of intellectual faculties evolving towards death in a state of cachectic dementia and can affirm that chronic arachnitis exists and is the cause of symptomatic insanity. BAYLE is probably not aware of the importance of his discovery, but the claims of priority of two of Esquirol's pupils, Delaye and A., have been ignored. Foville, will lead him to defend his ideas and to complete and embellish the monument of his youth. In 1825, he published Nouvelle doctrine des maladies mentales and the following year his "Traité des maladies du cerveau" in which he suggested that "most mental alienations are the symptom of a primitive chronic phlegmasia of the brain's membranes" thus generalising the notion of an organic lesion at the origin of mental illness. (Postel & Quetel pp. 577/578) "BAYLE was a