M. Y. Lakhtin. Historical Sketch of the Doctrine of Obsession. Review of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Experimental Psychology. 1901, Jan.

The author says that there has always been a lie in obsession, the essence of lies in it is unchanged, and that the primitive savage and the scientist of the 17th century differ only in the form of their beliefs. It is customary among primitive peoples to look at the sick as if possessed by the spirits of malice. The treatment of wild peoples is reduced to the expulsion of the spirit from the patient; they have several ways for this purpose. Grekov, a people more culturally, had the opinion that all diseases depend on the demons in the air, but even Hippocrates said that madness is a brain disease. Long before Plato and Aristotle, mental illness was viewed as organic suffering.