What was the meaning of these queer behaviors? At first they were very badly understood; they were supposed to have some connection with being possessed (with the devil), with miasmata, vapors, unlikely perturbations of the body and animal spirits that circulated in the nerves. One spoke, as did still Prof. Pomme at the end of the eighteenth century, "of the shrivelling up of the nerves."[14] But above all, one preserved the conviction that these queer disorders were very different to the mental disorders of lunacy. These peculiar individuals had, it was said, all their reason; they remained capable of understanding their fellow creatures and of being understood by them; they were not to be expelled from society like the poor lunatics; therefore their illness should be anything but the mental disorders of lunacy. Physicians, as it is just, watched their patients and only confirmed their opinion by fine scientific theories. They christened these new disorders by the name of neuroses, reserving the name of psychoses for the mental disorders of lunatics. During the whole of the nineteenth century the radical division of neuroses and psychoses was accepted as a dogma; on the one side, one described epilepsies, hysterias, neurasthenias; on the other, one studied manias, melancholias, paranoias, dementias, without preoccupying oneself in the least with the connections those very ill-defined disorders might have the ones with the others. This division was accentuated by the organization of the studies and the treatment of the patients. The houses that received the neurotic patients and the insane were absolutely distinct. The physicians who attended the ones and the others were different, and even supplied by different competitions. In France, even now, the recruiting of asylum house pupils and hospital house pupils, the recruiting of asylum doctors and that of hospital doctors, give an opportunity for different competitions. One might almost say that these two categories of house pupils and doctors have quite a different education. The result was that the examination of the patients, the study thereof, and even their treatment, were for the most part often conceived in quite a different manner. For example, neuroses were studied publicly; the examination was on elementary sensibilities, the movements of the limbs, and especially reflexes; the insane were more closely examined in the mental point of view, in conversations held with them by the physician alone. Their arguments, their ideas were noted more than their elementary movements. Strange to say, just when the psycho-therapeutic treatments by reasoning and moralizing with the patients were being developed, they stood out the contrary of what one might have supposed--that this treatment should be applied to neurotic patients alone. It was admitted that lunatics were probably not able to feel this moral and rational influence; they were treated by isolation, shower-baths, and purgatives.