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MENTAL HEALTH IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

From Melancholia
to Depression
Disordered Mood in
Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry
Åsa Jansson
 Mental Health in Historical Perspective

Series Editors
Catharine Coleborne
School of Humanities and Social Science
University of Newcastle
Callaghan, NSW, Australia

Matthew Smith
Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
Covering all historical periods and geographical contexts, the series
explores how mental illness has been understood, experienced, diagnosed,
treated and contested. It will publish works that engage actively with
contemporary debates related to mental health and, as such, will be
of interest not only to historians, but also mental health professionals,
patients and policy makers. With its focus on mental health, rather than
just psychiatry, the series will endeavour to provide more patient-centred
histories. Although this has long been an aim of health historians, it has
not been realised, and this series aims to change that.
The scope of the series is kept as broad as possible to attract good
quality proposals about all aspects of the history of mental health from
all periods. The series emphasises interdisciplinary approaches to the field
of study, and encourages short titles, longer works, collections, and titles
which stretch the boundaries of academic publishing in new ways.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14806
 Åsa Jansson

From Melancholia
to Depression
Disordered Mood in Nineteenth-Century
Psychiatry
Åsa Jansson
Institute for Medical Humanities
Durham University
Durham, UK

Mental Health in Historical Perspective

ISBN 978-3-030-54801-8 ISBN 978-3-030-54802-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54802-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access
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For Annika. Thank you, for everything.
 Preface

This book has been a long time in the making. The seeds were sown in
2009 when I started researching an M.A. dissertation on melancholia and
depressed mood in Wilhelm Griesinger’s work, and quickly realised that
there was a much bigger story to be told about what happened to the
melancholia concept in nineteenth-century psychiatry. This story became
the focus of a Ph.D. thesis on which this book is based.
Melancholia is a topic that has attracted vast attention from writers
across disciplines and genres, spanning a range of perspectives. At the
same time, much existing work on melancholia is underpinned by a
common theme: the belief that melancholy is a timeless human emotion,
a phenomenon that has remained largely constant as our societies have
changed, a shared experience that connects us to our ancestors of past
historical periods. Seen in this way, melancholy is a core feature of
humanity, as is its pathological mutation, melancholia. To understand
melancholia, then, is to understand something about what it means to
be human: to suffer without apparent cause.
As this is the context in which this book is written, and as it will
inevitably be read against the backdrop of a large catalogue of works
on melancholia and melancholy, it is only right that I confess that my
interest in this topic and my original motivation for exploring it are less
ambitious and more mundane than those of many of the writers who
have sought to make sense of this ubiquitous yet elusive feature of the
human condition. My initial interest in mood disorders arose in relation

vii
viii PREFACE

to the politics of the pharmaceutical industry and the medicalisation of

psychological distress that provides a lucrative market for drug companies.
I once offered this explanation in a scholarship interview, and it didn’t go
down very well. It was not, it seemed, how or why one is supposed to
do history. It was, however, the truth, though that original motivation
has since been superseded by a more fundamental desire to understand
how knowledge in the psy disciplines is produced, in particular relating to
psychiatric classification.
But I was never particularly interested in exploring melancholy as
a feeling. In the field of the history of psychiatry, the question that
often looms—usually unspoken—over our heads when we talk about
our research is that of personal experience. Do you write about melan-
cholia because of your own struggles with pathological low mood? The
short answer to that is no. My interest is more broadly in the produc-
tion of psychiatric knowledge about people, how our emotions, thoughts,
and actions become symptoms of psychiatric diagnoses. Depression has
become ubiquitous, more so than any other psychiatric condition—the
WHO considers it to be a leading cause of disability worldwide and the
prescription and consumption of antidepressant medication continue to
rise every year. I wanted to understand how we got to this point. But
when I delved into the world of historical scholarship on depression and
melancholia I soon discovered that a significant piece of the puzzle was
missing.
The more I read, the more evident it became that something funda-
mental occurred in the nineteenth century. Most writers on the topic,
whether they subscribe to a narrative of continuity or one of change,
recognise that today’s Major Depressive Disorder doesn’t correspond to
past conceptions of melancholia. But nineteenth-century melancholia was
not only significantly different from clinical depression as understood
today, it was equally different from the various forms of traditional melan-
choly madness that came before. As German Berrios has noted, a shift
occurred that was about more than just a change in language.1 The recon-
ceptualisation of melancholia in the nineteenth century facilitated the later
emergence of clinical depression in the twentieth, but it also paved the

1 German E. Berrios, “ Melancholia and Depression during the Nineteenth Century: A

Conceptual History,” British Journal of Psychiatry 153 (1988): 298–304.
 PREFACE ix

way for the creation of other affect-based diagnostic categories, such as

bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and anxiety disorders.
The story of how melancholia was reconfigured along biomedical lines
is not, then, only the story of a specific diagnosis, or state of mind, it is
also the story of how the modern concept ‘mood disorder’ was created.
That story didn’t begin on asylum wards, but with the rise of a new
discipline: experimental physiology. The epistemological framework that
was created in the early nineteenth century to explain the internal opera-
tion of emotions and ideas continues to form the basis for how we think
about psychological events today, and consequently informs the direction
of current research into the mind and brain. If we want to understand
how we arrived at this point in history where ‘depression’ is an illness that
can be treated with psychotropic medication and therapeutic strategies
aimed at teaching us to ‘regulate’ our emotions, we must first understand
how the idea of disordered mood as a medical condition became possible
in the first place. And we must also understand the relationship between
statistics and diagnostic practices, another distinctly modern development
that is crucial to mapping the creation not just of mood disorders but of
most modern psychiatric diagnoses.
This book, then, is an attempt to redress a significant gap in the history
of depression and melancholia, and of mood disorders more generally.
It arises from a desire to understand how knowledge that is absolutely
fundamental to the human experience in the twenty-first century was
created and made real. So, I didn’t come to this topic because of an
interest in melancholy as a feeling or a personal experience with depres-
sion. But of course, an interest in psychiatric knowledge is an interest
in knowledge about human distress and suffering, and in this way it
concerns us all. Most if not all of us will experience psychological distress
at some point in our lives (whether or not that distress is pathologised
and diagnosed). And what I found once I immersed myself in the archival
records of Victorian asylums was that while I don’t necessarily relate to
twenty-first-century descriptions of clinical depression, some of the ways
in which nineteenth-century asylum patients diagnosed with melancholia
expressed their distress resonated with me deeply. Many Victorian melan-
cholics appeared to display ‘symptoms’ that are largely consistent with
the key criteria of depression today, but equally common were profound
delusions, and in more severe cases hallucinations were not unusual.
x PREFACE

This led me to start asking questions about our current separation of affec-
tive (mood) and cognitive (schizo) disorders, which began in the nine-
teenth century and was cemented in the twentieth. That story is yet to be
told, and doesn’t form part of this book. But it looms in the background
and illustrates one of the most important differences between nineteenth-
century melancholia and clinical depression, in that delusions and hallu-
cinations are only a secondary and much less talked about feature of the
latter.
Finally, it should be emphasised that there are many ways in which one
can write the history of nineteenth-century melancholia. This book is an
attempt to write it as the history of medical and psychiatric conceptions of
what melancholia was—and became—in this period. In other words, this
book is not a search for answers about what melancholia feels (or felt)
like or why people are apparently afflicted by it. Nor is it an attempt to
right historical wrongs in psychiatry by demonstrating the timelessness of
melancholia as a medical condition. And it is not a critique of the ubiquity
of the clinical depression concept. These are all important issues, which
to various extents form the context for the present story, but they have
been, and are still being, comprehensively discussed elsewhere. This book
is the story of how the first modern mood disorder was created.
Why is this important? There are undoubtedly many reasons, but the
most fundamental is this: ‘knowledge about human beings changes what
people are’.2 An historical perspective on such knowledge is crucial. It
allows us to understand where it comes from, how it emerged, how it
operates, and most importantly how it becomes central to our lives. It
shows us that such knowledge is not permanent or universal. Mood disor-
ders constitute a particular, historically specific way of making sense of
and experiencing emotional distress. What shedding light on this histor-
ical specificity does is show us that the existence of this framework is not
inevitable. It’s very much real today—people are diagnosed with mood
disorders and experience themselves as suffering from these conditions—
but it hasn’t always been. This way of understanding emotional distress
is neither right nor wrong; it can be both helpful and harmful. What is
important is that we are equipped with the tools to think critically about
its place in our lives and the work that it does, and to equally allow for

2 Roger Smith, Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 8.
 PREFACE xi

different frameworks and ways of experience. This, in my view, is one of

the most important tasks of history: to remind us of the impermanence of
human nature, and that we have the power to fundamentally change the
way we understand our inner selves and the world around us.

Durham, UK Åsa Jansson

 Acknowledgements

I’m indebted to many people and institutions for their help and support
in the research and writing of this book. Thanks first of all to Molly
Beck at Palgrave Macmillan for her enthusiastic interest in and support
for the book, as well as to Maeve Sinnott for continuous support and
guidance during the writing process. Thanks also to the editors of the
Mental Health in Historical Perspective series, Catharine Coleborne and
Matthew Smith, and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful
comments on the proposal and manuscript.
This book would not have been possible without a generous scholar-
ship from the Wellcome Trust (grant number 092988/Z/10/Z), which
allowed me to research and write the thesis on which the book is based.
I’m also grateful to my colleagues and friends at the University of London
whose feedback at various stages of this project in its early years was instru-
mental in shaping the story that eventually became the present book, in
particular my Ph.D. supervisors Thomas Dixon and Rhodri Hayward, as
well as Sarah Chaney, Chris Millard, Jennifer Wallis, Tom Quick, Stephen
Jacyna, and Sonu Shamdasani. I’m also especially grateful to Felicity
Callard for continuous support and advice over the years.
Thanks also to my colleagues at the Institute for Medical Humani-
ties and Hearing the Voice at Durham University, in particular Angela
Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Victoria Patton, Ben Alderson-Day, Chris Cook,
Charles Fernyhough, Kaja Mitrenga, and Mary Robson. Working in a
collaborative and interdisciplinary context over the last few years has had

xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

a profound impact on my approach to history, and has led me to ask

sometimes difficult and uncomfortable questions about the role of histor-
ical research and historical perspective in the medical humanities, and
more fundamentally in our common endeavour to understand and redress
human suffering.
I’m also grateful to the following people for feedback, advice, and/or
fruitful conversations that have provided insight and guidance over the
years since I first began researching this topic: Ingrid Lindstedt, Roger
Smith, Rob Iliffe, Roger Cooter, Rebecca O’Neal, Victoria O’Callaghan,
Yewande Okuleye, and Eric Engstrom, as well as everyone who has
offered questions and comments on seminar and conference talks based
on different aspects of this research.
Finally, my deepest gratitude is due to the people whose unconditional
love and support have kept me (relatively) sane through the various stages
of this journey: Annika, Annelie, Britta, Melek, Becky, Shannon, Anna,
Danny, Sophie, Hanna, and Olly. Thank you.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Disordered Mood as Historical Problem 1

2 The Scientific Foundation of Disordered Mood 35

3 The Classification of Melancholia

in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Medicine 63

4 Melancholia and the New Biological Psychiatry 89

5 Statistics, Classification, and the Standardisation

of Melancholia 123

6 Diagnosing Melancholia in the Victorian Asylum 173

7 Conclusion: Melancholia, Depression, and the Politics

of Classification 209

Index 229

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Disordered Mood as Historical

Problem

If mania and melancholia took on the face that we still recognise today, it is
not because we have learnt to ‘open our eyes’ to their real nature during the
course of the centuries; and it is not because we have purified our perceptive
processes until they became transparent. It is because in the experience of
madness, these concepts were integrated around specific qualitative themes
that have lent them their own unity and given them a significant coherence,
finally rendering them perceptible.1
Michel Foucault, History of Madness (1961)

In the summer of 1874, Moses B., a young doctor, was brought into
Edinburgh Royal Asylum at Morningside. According to his family, he
had become so intent on taking his own life that they saw no other
option but to have him certified as insane and admitted to the hospital.
One of the doctors who examined him in his home had written in the
medical certificate that Moses suffered from severe ‘delusions’, which
had him convinced that ‘his soul is lost, that he ought to die’ and that
‘he is committing great sins’. When Moses arrived at Morningside, the
attending physician noted in the patient journal that the young man’s
‘depression’ was ‘considerable’, and made a note of his ‘suicidal tenden-
cies’, which, based on family testimony, consisted in ‘taking belladonna,
refusing food, &c’. Moses B. was subsequently diagnosed with melan-
cholia, with emphasis given to his pronounced ‘suicidal tendencies’, which
required that he be placed under close observation.

© The Author(s) 2021 1

Å Jansson, From Melancholia to Depression,
Mental Health in Historical Perspective,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54802-5_1
2 Å. JANSSON

For the experienced medical staff at Morningside, diagnosing Moses

was a straightforward matter. Melancholia was, at the time, a common
affliction among patients who arrived in the asylum. Its symptoms were
considered to be clearly recognisable and, according to the institution’s
chief physician, Thomas Clouston, the disease ran ‘a somewhat definite
course, like a fever’.2 But what would a twenty-first-century psychiatrist
or general practitioner make of a patient like Moses Black? Would they
conclude that he suffered from Major Depressive Disorder, prescribe him
a course of antidepressants, and put him on the waiting list for Cogni-
tive Behavioural Therapy? Or would his thoughts and actions—believing
himself to have sinned against God and attempting to poison himself—
appear unfamiliar to today’s clinicians? These questions speak to a more
profound, ontological concern: is clinical depression a timeless condition?
In other words, have people always been depressed?
I will return to this question momentarily. Whether or not depression
has always been a feature of the human condition, if current statistics
are to be believed we are, as a society, becoming more depressed with
each passing year. According to the World Health Organisation, clinical
depression is now the world’s leading cause of disability. When a new
generation of antidepressant drugs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs), flooded the market in the late twentieth century, one scholar
suggested that we had entered an ‘antidepressant era’.3 In the 1990s,
SSRIs became what benzodiazepines were to the sixties—the universal
cure for unwanted negative emotions. A common question in response to
these developments, which has been posed by scholars across the natural
and human sciences, is whether rates of depression have increased, or
whether we have become less tolerant of emotional distress, or simply
more likely to denote it as a medical problem with a chemical solution.
It has been suggested that the apparent rise in depression is primarily
due to a growing tendency to over-diagnose ‘normal sadness’.4 Others
argue that there has been a real increase in the symptoms of genuine
Major Depressive Disorder since the early twentieth century, leading one
observer to conclude that depression is, like obesity and type-II diabetes,
a ‘disease of modernity’ caused by humanity’s collective derailment from
our true evolutionary path, suggesting that ‘humans have dragged a body
with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary,
sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-
isolating environment with dire consequences’.5
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISORDERED MOOD AS HISTORICAL PROBLEM 3

However, a different school of thought exists that has found support

both in clinical circles and among some humanities scholars: that, histori-
cally, two types of depression have coexisted.6 One is a mild to moderate
form of mood disorder, what is usually meant by the term ‘clinical depres-
sion’ today: low mood and sadness, often accompanied by sleeplessness,
appetite disruption, and anxiety. The other is an endogenous form that
is more than a mental disorder, it is an illness where the entire system
is, in effect, ‘pressed down’, resulting in retarded speech and slow bodily
movement. This illness often manifests with delusions (psychosis) and can
in its most severe forms leave sufferers in a catatonic stupor. This condi-
tion is usually referred to as psychotic or melancholic depression. Existing
research on this type of depression holds the promise of something that
has eluded psychiatry since its infancy: a mood disorder with a trace-
able and measurable biological basis. Endocrine psychiatry indicates that
individuals who fit the external symptomatology for melancholic depres-
sion show similar results when subjected to a Dexamethasone Suppression
Test (DST) measuring the level of cortisol in the blood. Such research
is, however, marginalised in the current neuro-focused climate where
neurotransmitters are conceptualised as the cause, effect, and cure for
depression, and where the major diagnostic manuals retain a descriptive
focus. Another key feature of melancholic depression is its perceived resis-
tance to standard antidepressant treatments such as SSRIs and behavioural
therapies; instead, it is argued that patients tend to respond to a combi-
nation of electroconvulsive therapy and atypical (tricyclic) antidepressants.
In recent years, a number of scholars and clinicians have sought to insti-
tute this type of depression into diagnostic literature as an illness in its
own right: melancholia.7
This drive to formally institute melancholia into psychiatric diagnostic
literature is presented as an attempted ‘resurrection’ of a condition that
has existed throughout human history and been documented by physi-
cians as far back as Hippocrates. This melancholia, its proponents argue,
‘lends itself to definition as an independent entity in the classification’ and
‘is consistent with centuries of observation’.8 It is constituted as universal
and timeless, the ‘real’ depression, whereas our time’s standard clinical
depression is seen to have more in common with the nervous disorders
of the early modern period or neurasthenia in the nineteenth century.
Authors beyond the psy disciplines who have adopted this view constitute
a broad church, including historians, philosophers, and social scientists,
4 Å. JANSSON

and their work is prominent within existing scholarship on the history of

melancholia.9
Max Fink and Michael Taylor, two psychiatrists who are at the fore-
front of the campaign to resurrect melancholia, argue that this disease
is ‘consistently’ described in ‘psychopathological literature’ as ‘a severe
illness of acute onset with unremitting moods of apprehension and
gloom, psychomotor disturbance, and vegetative signs. Psychosis, inter-
mittent mania, and suicide intent are prominent features’.10 What is
most noteworthy about this is not the definition itself, but that the ‘psy-
chopathological literature’ referred to is from the mid-nineteenth century.
Indeed, while those attempting to ‘resurrect’ melancholia assert that this
illness has existed since the beginning of time, the disease they are seeking
to revive appears to be an updated version of a diagnostic category specific
to nineteenth-century psychological medicine.
What, then, is this nineteenth-century melancholia that some writers
are attempting to bring back to life? Is it a timeless illness finally discov-
ered and described by nineteenth-century doctors? It would certainly be
possible to write the history of melancholic depression as the history of
a medical condition that has existed since the dawn of humanity, and
which was finally given an accurate scientific description in the nineteenth
century. But this narrative ignores a number of important factors. First of
all, the very idea of a ‘mood disorder’ was not possible before a modern,
scientific model of emotion was created. Secondly, melancholic depression
was not suddenly discovered with the help of modern medical science.
Rather, the meaning of melancholia as a medical condition changed—
in other words, melancholia was reconceptualised as a modern mood
disorder in the nineteenth century. This process required significant intel-
lectual work, and was made possible by the appropriation of experimental
physiology to talk about unseen and unmeasurable mental phenomena.
The model of emotion that emerged in the early-to-mid-nineteenth
century was not discovered, it was made—originally as an analogy of
sensory-motor action, which eventually became a scientific concept in
its own right. There was nothing inevitable about this development; as
one scholar has suggested, ‘implications had to be constructed rather than
merely extrapolated’.11 Finally, as will be demonstrated in the chapters
that follow, the melancholia that was described by nineteenth-century
physicians and diagnosed in asylum patients had a distinct symptoma-
tology, which does not seamlessly correspond to either the milder or the
‘melancholic’ depressions that are diagnosed today.
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISORDERED MOOD AS HISTORICAL PROBLEM 5

There exists, then, a different history of melancholia and depression,

one that is yet to be told. It is this history that is the focus of this book. It
maps the first decades of melancholia as a biomedical disease, but rather
than showing how this timeless illness was finally discovered and correctly
described by modern psychiatry, this book tells the story of how the idea
of a ‘mood disorder’ was created in the nineteenth century and subse-
quently made into a possible and plausible medical concept. This was
a development that to some extent occurred simultaneously in several
European countries; however, important national differences existed. For
instance, French physicians were more concerned with melancholia as one
stage of ‘circular insanity’ (the other being mania) than their German or
British counterparts; indeed, British physicians held that cases of circular
insanity were rare among their patients. Such geographical differences
speak to the malleability of mental disorders not just across time, but also
across cultural or linguistic contexts. This book is primarily concerned
with melancholia in the British context, for three reasons. First of all,
melancholia was consistently diagnosed in British asylums throughout
the second half of the nineteenth century, and the wealth of asylum
records and statistical reports, as well as prolific diagnostic literature on
melancholia, offer an optimal space for interrogating this medical cate-
gory. In many asylums across the country, melancholia was the second
most common diagnosis after mania. From the mid-nineteenth century
onward, the rate increased gradually, and at the same time, the diag-
nosis was gradually standardised. This coherence across asylums as far
apart as Edinburgh and Sussex was in part the result of a standardised
regime imposed by the Lunacy Commission from the 1840s onward,
as well as growing professional interaction between asylum physicians
through meetings and publications. Secondly, Germany is often presented
in historical narratives as the cradle of modern psychiatric knowledge
and the most important influence on contemporary diagnostics. This is
in part due to the significance of Emil Kraepelin’s work and the promi-
nent place awarded to his nosology in both historical and contemporary
texts on psychiatric diagnostics. However, while Kraepelin’s division of
mental disorders into dementia praecox and manic-depressive insanity at
the turn of the twentieth century had a fundamental impact on the subse-
quent classification of insanity, his diagnostic system was the product and
articulation of decades of accumulated knowledge, much of which origi-
nated within British psychological medicine. In particular, one of the most
6 Å. JANSSON

crucial developments of modern psychiatry and the focus of this book—

the creation of ‘mood disorder’ as a medical category—can in large
part be attributed to the intellectual context of British asylum medicine.
Finally, while a truly inter- or transcultural history of melancholia in this
period would no doubt be a fascinating one, such an approach would limit
the possibility for an in-depth study of its transformation. At the same
time, however, the making of melancholia as a modern mood disorder
in Victorian medicine did not occur in a national vacuum. The uptake of
German and, to an extent, French medical knowledge into British psycho-
logical medicine was instrumental, and consequently forms part of the
present story.
This book begins with early nineteenth-century experimental physi-
ology and ends in the Victorian asylum at the turn of the twentieth
century. Victorian physicians conceptualised melancholia as a form of
affective insanity in which the intellect was left wholly or partially intact.
During European psychiatry’s foundational century biological disease
models came to dominate, underpinned by increasingly refined medico-
scientific technology, specifically microscopy. Physicians were able to ‘see’
into the brains of deceased patients in ways never before possible, and
eagerly searched for cerebral lesions to support biomedical theories of
mental disease. Contrary to one historian’s suggestion that ‘neuropsy-
chiatry never really flourished in Britain’,12 Victorian medical psycholo-
gists embraced neurological explanatory frameworks for mental disease.
However, despite the spread and growing sophistication of psychiatric
autopsies in Europe, some forms of madness consistently failed to turn
up visible changes to brain tissue.13 This was particularly the case with
milder forms of insanity where the emotions were seen as the chief site
of pathology. In a biomedical context, such illness came to be explained
primarily through functional physiological (rather than structural anatom-
ical) language.
In 1883, Scottish asylum physician Thomas Clouston defined melan-
cholia as ‘mental pain, emotional depression, and sense of ill-being,
usually more intense than in melancholy, with loss of self-control, or
insane delusions, or uncontrollable impulses towards suicide, with no
proper capacity left to follow ordinary avocations, with some of the
ordinary interests of life destroyed, and generally with marked bodily
symptoms’.14 At this time, melancholia was not only one of the most
common forms of mental disease diagnosed in British asylums, it was also
one of the most standardised and homogenous diagnoses, both in terms
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as in the original. Some translations are poor or incorrect but have been retained as in the
original, except as noted in the list below.
The corrections listed in the Errata have been made except where the Errata entry is itself
incorrect. Other obvious printer or spelling errors have been corrected without note.
Archaic English and Scottish spellings have been retained as in the original.
The following substantive errors have been retained as in the original:
p. 13, maxim 7 - "not valid" should be "valid."
p. 18, maxim 5 - "Catella" should be "Catalla"; "A little whelp, (perhaps cattle)" should be
"Chattels."
p. 21, maxim 7 - "Condictio" should be "Conditio"; "The appointment of an action for a
certain day" should be "A condition."
p. 22, maxim 2 - "Condictio præcedens" should be "Conditio præcedens"; "The
appointment of an action preceding" should be "The fulfillment of a condition precedent."
p. 29, maxim 8 - "lex volentes" should be "lex nolentes"; "law draws those who are willing"
should be "law draws those who are unwilling."
p. 54, maxim 5 - The Errata indicate that "three witnesses may be brought" should be in
the translation, but that is not supported by the Latin, which is correct as is and says
nothing about witnesses.
p. 62, maxim 7 - "est alleganda" should be "non est allegenda"; "to be alleged" should be
"not to be alleged."
p. 80, maxim 3 - "casis" should be "cassis"; the translation should be "Law is the safest
helmet."
p. 139, maxim 2 - The Latin maxim should read, "Quemadmodum ad quæstionem facti
non respondent judices, ita ad quæstionem juris non respondent juratores"; the
translation should read, "As judges do not answer to questions of fact, jurors do not
answer to questions of law."
p. 151, maxim 3 - The Errata entry, "consensus," does not appear in the text of this
maxim.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION
OF LATIN MAXIMS & RULES, IN LAW AND EQUITY ***

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