by Jessie Roberts
Ryan Jacobs explores the history of cultural responses to clinical lycanthropy, an extremely rare disorder characterized by a patient’s conviction that he or she is a werewolf:
France identified a high of 30,000 werewolf cases during the Inquisition “between 1520 and 1630, many of which ended under extremely cruel circumstances at the hands of the Inquisitor’s executioner.” Of course, these strong beliefs increase the chances of conflating actual clinical cases (“a strict clinical diagnosis of clinical lycanthropy hinges on the patient’s verbal report of having turned [or being able to turn] into a wolf”) with misrepresentations due to religious pressures.
But even in the Early and Middle Ages, however, there’s some evidence that doctors were treating it as a natural disease with a cure, rather than a damning demonic spell. Primitive health care recommended “dietary measures, complex galenical drugs, hot baths, purgation, vomiting, and bloodletting to the point of fainting” and many doctors labeled it “as a type of melancholia (i.e. a disease due to an excess of black bile), whereas Paul of Nicaea classified it as a type of mania.” Surprisingly, the 7th century Greek Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina linked it to brain disorders, “notably epilepsy, humoral pathology and the use of hallucinogenic drugs.” By the 1800s, physicians had finally more broadly and formally defined it “as a delusional belief.”
(Image of a German woodcut of a werewolf, 1722, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
