Professor of French John C. O'Neal's article "Understanding and Interpreting Confusion: Philippe Pinel and the Invention of Psychiatry" is among the articles included in volume XXVI (2007) of Lumen. Travaux choisis de la Société canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle. Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, pp. 243-258.
In the history of medicine, Philippe Pinel effected a dramatic reform in the care of the mentally ill at the Salpêtrière hospice in Paris when he had the chains of 80 patients removed in 1796. O'Neal, chair of the French Department, studies Pinel's "moral treatment" of the mentally ill and traces Pinel's methods to the Enlightenment's modern perspective on complexity. O'Neal will be teaching a seminar in the spring of 2008 at Hamilton on "Madness and Genius in the Age of Enlightenment."
