It's funny how words make you think about other things. The author begins the chapter by discussing "monomania" and how it indicates the beginning of the term obsession. It immediately made me think of Beatlemania and how when the media talks about the Beatles and this time period they always show large groups of young women going ga ga over the band. They seemed to be obsessed with the Beatles.
So much of the history of OCD seems to be related to religion, culture and class. How ironic in that today we feel that everyone is equal regardless of one's religion, culture and class - at least that is the picture the US wants out there. Today these three aspects of peoples lives are not to be thought of as far as diagnosing and treating OCD or any other medical or mental disorder where in the past the specialists felt that some of these things caused the disorders. In the past "monomania" was something people wanted, desired. The author whose article was published in the American Journal of Insanity insinuated that the disease affected those with large active brains - I guess trying to say that those with monomania are more intelligent because they have a bigger brain. I had to laugh to myself with reference to this statement and other similar ones.
I had never thought about how many classic novels have some sort of referrence or a character with OCD. The authors mentioned, Dickens, Shelley and Balzac were all ahead of their time as far as portraying the disease. For something that was thought of in such a different way so long ago and to still be recognized as the disease today just goes to show how far science and research has gone.
The last section really made me think about the difference between the idea of a Renaissance man or woman and the idea of specialization in one particular area. You would think that in order to be the "best" forensic scientist you would have to spend much of your time studying and reading about that particular field. The same holds true for specific fields of law and medicine. With the amount of information out there that one is expected to know, one would have to be obsessed in order to retain the massive amounts of information. I hadn't thought about "specializing" as obsessive before reading this chapter, but I now think of it in a different way.
It is interesting that OCD was known by so many other diseases prior to it's current name. I wonder what it will be known as n the future......
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