Linnæus’s taxonomy of mental disease

I heard a reference to this at the recent workshop on the Ontology of Disease – everyone associates Linnaeus with his taxonomy of organisms, but this curiosity seems to be a little bit more obscure. I did a little googling and managed to find various pages mentioning a categorisation of mental disease. I’d love to see the original manuscript.

I cheekily added this as a slide during a recent talk to some eminent experts on fish evolution at a NESCENT workshop and was chuffed to discover that they’d never heard of it before. Some of the subspecies got a few laughs.

Here it is:

• Mental – (genus)
  • PATHETIC – (species)
    • citta — desire to eat what is not food
    • bulimia — insatiable desire for food
    • polydipsia — continuous desire for drink
    • satyriasis — enormous desire for sex
    • erotomania — indecent desire for lovers
    • nostalgia — desire for country and relatives
    • Tarantismus – desire for dancing, often caused by an insect bite
    • rabies — desire to bite and lacerate the harmless
    • hydrophobia — aversion to drink
    • cacositia — aversion to food, accompanied by horror of it
    • antipathia — aversion to a particular object
    • anxietas — aversion to ordinary things, with pain in the heart

~ by mutantphenotype on December 1, 2006.