Psychology

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather guide
1846 E H Weber reports on his pioneering quantitative investigations of touch in On Touch and Common Sensibility...

From Handy Answer: The Handy Psychology Answer Book
The study of mental processes as a science is relatively new because it is dependent on the scientific revolution. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is credited with first establishing psychology as an independent science.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Originally, a lunatic asylum or madhouse, and hence a place of hubbub and confusion. The priory of St Mary of Bethlehem outside Bishopsgate, London, was founded in 1247 and began to receive lunatics in 1377.

In psychology, a disorder commonly known today as conversion disorder, in which a psychological conflict is converted into a bodily disturbance.

From Chamber's Dictionary of the Unexplained
A form of insanity once thought to come with the changes in the moon.

From Encyclopedia of Special Education
Idiot is an archaic term used from the turn of the century through the 1950s to denote an individual with mental retardation whose measured IQ fell below 25 or 30. It (...) was used comparatively with lesser degrees of retardation (i.e., imbecile and moron).

From Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850
Madness was a highly topical subject in Britain during the earlier years of the Romantic era.

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
In his very first works between 1895 and 1897, Freud understood melancholia as a form of depression of variable intensity, linked to a loss of mental energy – he mainly drew on the popular theory of neurasthenia.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Condition characterized by general lassitude, irritability, lack of concentration, worry, and hypochondria. The term was introduced into psychiatry in 1869 by George M. Beard, an American neurologist; he believed it to be a neurosis with a fatigue component.

A technique of traditional Chinese medicine, in which a number of very fine metal needles are inserted into the skin at specially designated points.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Also called bleeding, practice of drawing blood from the body in the treatment of disease. General bloodletting consists of the abstraction of blood by incision into an artery (arteriotomy) or vein (venesection, or phlebotomy).

In psychiatry, treatment of mood disorders by means of electricity; the broader term "shock therapy" also includes the use of chemical agents.

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
An exorcism is a ritual, formalized by the Catholic Church during the seventeenth century, performed on a person exhibiting signs of demonic possession. Possession is said to occur when the Devil enters and takes over the physical and mental faculties of the victim.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Use of water in the treatment of illness or injury. Although the medicinal and hygienic value of water was recognized by the early Greeks, hydrotherapy attained its widest use in the 18th and 19th cent. through the practice of the British physician Sir John Floyer and an Austrian peasant, Vincenz Priessnitz.

From Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychology
A now defunct form of physical treatment, at one time advocated for schizophrenia patients, in which patients were repeatedly administered insulin (see s. 2) in order to induce a comatose state.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Surgical procedure for cutting nerve pathways in the frontal lobes of the brain. The operation has been performed on mentally ill patients whose behavioral patterns were not improved by other forms of treatment.

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Psychosurgery, by definition, implies the destruction of brain tissue for the relief of severe, persistent, and debilitating psychiatric symptomatology.

Trephination involves the production of a defect in the skull vault to create communication between the cranial cavity and the environment, whose success depends upon avoidance of injury to the meninges, brain and blood vessels.