Stephanus Bisius (1724–1790) on mania and melancholy, and the disorder called plica polonica

ABSTRACT

Stephanus Bisius (1724–1790) was a physician of Italian descent and a graduate of the University of Pavia. He was invited to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early 1760s and became head of the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University in 1781. In 1772, Bisius had authored the first original study on nervous and mental diseases in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In his 35-page booklet, written in Latin and Polish, Bisius characterized mania and melancholy as diseases of the brain, explaining that the organs that feed the human soul are affected, not the soul itself. He introduced the principles of humoralism and solidism to readers, and recognized that autopsies had failed to reveal reliable findings concerning mania or melancholy. Bisius also described the origins of the challenging disorder called plica polonica, a strange condition associated with tufts of matted hair. As a physician during the medical Enlightenment, Bisius criticized metaphysical speculations in medicine and stated that plica was only a result of superstitions. Even though he proposed antiphlogistic treatments for patients with mania and melancholy, he maintained that time and faith in God might help some patients overcome their infirmities.

KEYWORDS:

• Stephanus Bisius
• mania
• melancholy
• plica polonica
• eighteenth century
• Vilnius University
• Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Historian M. Ramonaitė suggested that Bisius’s year of death was not 1790, but probably a decade later, in 1800 (see Ramonaitė 2017). However, the date of 1790 is more widely established in historiography and therefore will be used in this article.

2. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), the Fowlers, and most other phrenologists during the 1800s assessed temperaments using this ancient classification system, in addition to examining and palpating skulls as a way to evaluate their various faculties of mind. Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), however, called the four humors and the four temperaments unsubstantiated nonsense (Finger and Eling 2019).

3. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a European state that existed from the thirteenth century until 1795, when it was partitioned among the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania incorporated large portions of neighboring states, including what is now Belarus and parts of Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, and Russia. During its greatest extent, especially during the fifteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had become the largest state in Europe (Suziedelis 2011).

4. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was a biconfederation of Poland and Lithuania, ruled by a monarch who was both the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania, and a legislature called the sejm, controlled by the nobility. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest countries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, established in 1569, and collapsed in 1795 (Šapoka 1936). The Constitution of Lithuania and Poland, approved in 1791, is considered Europe’s first, and the world’s second modern written national constitution (after the U.S. Constitution, which came into force in 1789). The political system of the Commonwealth is now believed to be a precursor to modern concepts of democracy, constitutional monarchy, and federation (Janowski 2004).

5. The golden ducat in the eighteenth-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was equal to 16 silver zloty and 3 silver groszy, or 502.5 copper groszy (Remecas 2000).

6. However, the autopsy of the deceased King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Stephen Bathory—performed in 1586 by his physicians, Simone Simoni (1532–1602) and Niccolo Buccella (c.1520–1599), to find out the cause of the king’s death—is considered to be the first ever performed autopsy in this region. Interestingly, Buccella thought that Bathory suffered from what we would now call asthma, whereas Simoni claimed the monarch had epilepsy (Meškauskas 1987).

7. S.P.D., meaning salutem plurimam dicit (“sending many greetings”) in Latin.

8. Only the page numbers will be given for subsequent references to this 1772 volume.

9. Melancholia est Delirium absque febri, cum timore, tristitia, diuturno animi angore conjunctum, & certis objectis valde adhaerens (Bisius 1772).

10. Mani est Delirium absque febri, cum furor, audacia, & ingenti membrorum roborare (Bisius 1772).

11. Quod ad rem meam attinet, satis est, animam a DEO fine ullo vitio physico creatam esse, dumque corpori est unita, per mechanica organa operationes suas exercere, atque ab iis subinde citra voluntatem suam, vitio eorumdem organorum, deflectere, (ut videre est in ebriis, dementibus, & febrium phrenesi), quin ejus essentia ulli vel minimae subjiciatur mutationi (Bisius 1772).

12. [S]anguinis fluxus intercipitur aut impeditur, & major copia, (per hydraulicas leges) ad alias corporis partes, sic & ad caput, (praecipue si cerebri vasa naturaliter imbecilliora sunt & laxiora), impellitur … ; plus seri in ventriculis excernitur; atque his denique vitiis, si aliquae laeduntur ex cerebri fibrillis, quibus anima utitur, ope nervosi fluidi, ad ejus operationes exercendas, rectus rationis usus in proportione impeditur, & Melancholicus vel Maniacus fit homo (Bisius 1772).

14. Plica non est morbus, sed popularis error, a negligentia & praejudicata populi opinione genitus, a vetularum & Agyrtarum fallacium ignorantia alitus, ab irrationali quorundam Sacerdotum credulitate roboratus (Bisius 1772).

13. Somnambulism, another disorder without physical markers, had also been attributed to witchcraft in the 1600s, as evidenced in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” For more on the history of somnambulism and its transition from metaphysics to a disorder of nature, see Umanath, Sarezky, and Finger (2011).

15. Franz Joseph Gall would adopt this strategy during the 1790s, when he started to write about practical medicine, and also when he began to construct his organology (later called phrenology) in ultraconservative Vienna. He would continue to employ the same strategy, trying to sidestep religious dogma while dealing with the brain, after he moved to Paris (Finger and Eling 2019).

16. Bisius’s colleague, professor of surgery Jacques Antuan Briôtet, also lectured on external head wounds, concussions, subdural and intracerebral extravasations, and trepanation at Vilnius University (Biziulevičius 1997).