Inheriting madness: professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in nineteenth-century France

Unicornis has featured widely as a mythical animal and has given rise to many fantasies. There has been much speculation about its identity, but the oryx must be the favourite. .. In Africa and Arabia there are several species of oryx. The Arabian oryx is about the size of the ibex, has big feet for walking on sand and long slender annulated horns. The horns are soft in the young oryx and often get damaged or deformed during growth. The result can be the reduction of one horn to a curly insignificant stump. Thus the oryx becomes the unicorn. (p. 87.) While some mention is made of its mythology, the wonder of the unicorn and the richness of the traditions associated with it, for example that is was a symbol of Christ hunted from heaven by the angel Gabriel, is lost among the details about the way the creature is depicted by the artists of the different families of bestiaries. At other points the discussions are heavily literal and chiefly paraphrases and translations of the bestiary entries about the animal: Bos according to the texts, is an amicable beast, the friend of its companion under the yoke. If the companion is absent, Bos moos. It can predict the weather: if rain is coming, it knows that it is wise to stay in the shed, but if it can sense an improvement it sticks its head out of the shed to show that it is ready to emerge. And, as the text says, Bos has a heavy dewlap. (p.104.) Elsewhere, however, novel information is provided, such as about the camel, apparently brought to England during the Middle Ages-indeed, one was kept at King's Langley in 1290. But birds-Yapp's obvious passion-dominate the whole book, and show his careful observation and wide reading. This wealth of detail about real birds: "the brood patch, a highly vascular area of the breast free of feathers developed by most species of birds during incubation" (p. 175), is not matched with regard to those mythical ones like the phoenix, whose entry seems a bit thin. Other weaknesses of this kind are evident in the authors' ignorance of the midrash and its importance for the conception of the serpent as originally upright and having arms and legs and of such creatures which derive from midrashic explanations of scripture, like the draconopede. There is a detailed index of Latin …