Body and mind in nineteenth-century medicine: Some clinical origins of the neurosis construct

Contemporary physicians often file the study of relations between body and mind under the rubric of psychosomatic medicine, a mid-twentiethcentury movement inspired by a self-conscious desire to counteract what its founders felt to be the profession's dominant mechanistic and reductionist tendencies. Yet interest in the relationship between body and mind is, of course, much older. Physicians have always assumed that emotional factors can induce sickness, undergird health, or – properly manipulated – bring about its restoration. The hypothetical mechanisms used to explain this interdependence have changed during the past few centuries, but the clinical reality they sought to explain has never been in doubt.