This chapter picks up on Chapter 6, and looks further into the history of the moralization of mental illness from the late antique period to the end of the Middle Ages, with the discourses focusing on the topics of debauchery, wine-consumption, sexual excess and general depravity in the case of phrenitis. The lines are those traced by the patristic material, among which Augustine stands out as the most prolific source; the moral allegory is then further elaborated in adaptation to the themes and concerns of medieval theology and the various developments in medical physiological concepts and pathological ideas. The chapter concludes with the figure of Falstaff, the Shakespearian character who best represents this early-modern outcome of 'ethical phrenitis' as a disease of squander, drunkenness and sexual licentiousness.

Chapter 6 looks at the construction of the phrenitic man in wider culture, from non-technical discussions of the disease to its allegorical or hyperbolical honing to a paradigm of folly, ignorance, depravity and moral weakness. In this chapter I look at the earliest occurrences of the term in Greek in non-medical writings, which are fairly late (Hellenistic: Menander's Aspis), and then at the bulk of the ancient evidence, which is largely ethical-philosophical and, most of all,found in theological, prudential and hagiographic contexts. Augustine is the central author here, whose contruction of the phreniticuswill be a most influential model in the centuries to come.