Psychosomatic medicine begins with the Greeks. It finds a place in Galen's system as diseases of passion, a concept current until the middle of the nineteenth century. The great French and German clinicians of the nineteenth century were all familiar with psychosomatic diseases. During the twentieth century the field was for a while monopolized by psychoanalysts. The psychosomatic specialist is essentially the doctor who listens to the patient.

This research is part of the NIMH-CRB Collaborative Study on the psychobiology of depression. The main objective of the research programme is to test hypotheses concerning the interaction of neurobiological mechanisms and behaviour in the depressive disorders. Part I of the report describes the rationale and the overall approach to measuring behavioural state and outcome in the research programme. Part II reports on the results of applying the behavioural methods to a comparison of the clinical phenomenology of unipolar and bipolar depression. The behavioural patterns expressed during the episode by the two groups are different. Further, the two types are shown to react differently to treatment with tricyclic drugs, reinforcing the thesis that they are qualitatively distinct forms of the depressive disorders.

Sydenham's reputation rests in part on his self-deceptive assertion that he allowed clinical observation to speak for itself. In fact, however, his mind was steeped in philosophical world-views that went back via the Scholastics and Galen to Plato and Aristotle. A brief survey of these views is presented to clarify Sydenham's message. The basic formula of logical set theory is then used to put in perspective Sydenham's disease postulates and later views on the nature of disease. The point is made that, in the case of cryptogenic diseases, we sometimes tend to revert unwittingly to ideas akin to those of Sydenham.

The hallucinations of 23 patients with predominantly religious themes were compared with descriptions of visions from the Middle Ages. Although there were many points of similarity between the two classes of phenomena, none of the medieval visionaries was identified as mentally ill. The role of cultural norms in determining the attribution of mental illness, and the limitations of Euro-American criteria of psychoses, are discussed in the light of these findings.

A detailed account is given of the historical background and current status of the concepts of transitory delusional state (bouffée délirante) and chronic delusional state in French psychiatry. Their relations with other nosological systems are discussed.