Stone of madness

The stone of folly or the stone of madness refers to a hypothetical procedure in the 15th century involving trepanation and extraction of a stone, thought to be the cause of the patient's madness.[1][2] This procedure is demonstrated in the painting The Extraction of the Stone of Madness by Hieronymus Bosch.[3] The procedure and the painting depicting it inspired the 2002 Canadian short film The Stone of Folly.[4]

References

  1. Vigué, Jordi (2002). Great Masters of Western Art. ISBN 0-8230-2113-0. There was a popular belief that a so-called "stone of madness" caused idiocy or dementia. To cure this, it was believed necessary to remove a section of the ...
  2. Shorter, Edward. A History of Psychiatry. ISBN 0-471-24531-3. In the Middle Ages, doctors fantasized about cutting for the mythical "stone of madness." In our own time, there is evidence that the course of Parkinson's ...
  3. Povoledo, Elisabetta (October 27, 2008). "In Rome, a New Museum Invites a Hands-On Approach to Insanity". The Economist. Retrieved 2008-10-28. The logo of the Mind’s Museum is an overturned funnel. It is a reference to a 15th-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch that depicts a doctor using a scalpel to extract an object (the supposed “stone of madness”) from the skull of a patient. The doctor is wearing a funnel as a hat.
  4. Diskson, Alastair. "The Stone of Folly". Retrieved 2008-04-17.
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