Hist Psychiatry. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 Jul 10.
Published in final edited form as:
PMCID: PMC4090416
EMSID: EMS58617
Battling demons with medical authority: werewolves, physicians and rationalization
The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at Hist Psychiatry
Abstract
Werewolves
and physicians experienced their closest contact in the context of
early modern witch and werewolf trials. For medical critics of the
trials, melancholic diseases served as reference points for medical
explanations of both individual cases and werewolf beliefs in general.
This
paper attempts to construct a conceptual history of werewolf beliefs
and their respective medical responses. After differentiating the
relevant terms, pre-modern werewolf concepts and medical lycanthropy are
introduced. The early modern controversy between medical and
demonological explanations forms the main part of this study. The
history of werewolves and their medical explanations is then traced
through to present times. An important point of discussion is to what
extent the physicians’ engagements with werewolves can be characterized
as rationalization.
Keywords: Johann Weyer, lycanthropy, melancholy, reception, werewolves, witch trials
The
illness lycanthropy is documented in medical compendia from the second
century AD onwards, to describe individuals who believed they were
wolves. In the nineteenth century, when the field of mental illness was
reorganized and new diagnostic classes replaced earlier ones,
lycanthropy disappeared from the medical textbooks, and the symptoms
previously associated with the condition were incorporated into other
nosological concepts (Hackenbroch, 1968:
40–5, 53). However, lycanthropy persisted in the cultural consciousness
of the population, and the long-established term was even used
occasionally during the twentieth century as a means of ensuring
interest in the few case studies published (e.g. Keck et al., 1988; Surawicz and Banta, 1986).
Werewolves feature so strongly in the genres of popular film and
literature that the concepts found there tend to dominate ideas of any
possible transition between human and wolf. Moreover, an often gruesome
history of werewolf beliefs and persecution mistakenly attributed to
‘dark’ medieval times flavours the modern discourse on lycanthropy with
the disturbing spice of reality. Werewolves were perceived as a threat
that was real enough to the people of many European countries during the
times of the witch hunts between the late fifteenth and the seventeenth
centuries.
Even though the concept of lycanthropy has
changed fundamentally over the centuries, physicians have always played a
part in its history. They wrote about lycanthropes as severely
melancholic but harmless madmen; served as court-appointed experts in
werewolf trials; adapted the medical concept of lycanthropy several
times to meet contemporary challenges; refuted werewolf beliefs as
superstitious; found lycanthropic patients even in twentieth-century
psychiatric wards; and sought to explain the early modern werewolf craze
retrospectively by way of medical diagnosis. What connects many of
those iatric engagements with lycanthropy is their deeply rooted
naturalistic approach towards ‘irrational’ phenomena, be it madness,
superstition or the more disturbing occurrences of history.
Rationalizing seems to be an activity very close the traditional
self-concept of many physicians, both in pre-modern and modern medical
practice.
In this paper I will examine the
relationship between medical, historical and fictional interpretations
of lycanthropy, focusing on the recurring theme of ‘rationalizing’ by
physicians. However, the concepts of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ are
themselves historically bound, and must be considered from a
deconstructivist perspective. Therefore, this paper is not only about
the history of werewolves and physicians, but also about rationalization
as a form of self-assurance on the part of the medical profession and
the seductive charms which rationalization lays over disturbing
phenomena, bringing order to the preternatural and sinister.
