He recommended that those trying to escape religious compulsions receive God’s grace, study sacred Scripture, pray constantly, and put up a spirited resistance to the urge to pray or confess excessively. Antoninus’s belief that scrupulosity sometimes had a physical cause, and not necessarily a satanic one, was one of the earliest documented realisations that maladies of thought and behaviour were illnesses necessitating “medicine or other physical remedies” as he put it. The Italian Dominican friar and Archbishop of Florence, Antoninus of Florence (1389–1459) described the “scrupulous conscience” as beset by indecision resulting from wild, baseless fears that one has not prayed or otherwise acted according to God’s wishes, which can be caused by either the devil or physical illness. This inordinate fear that she had committed a mortal sin, compounded by excessive fasts, not only caused her confessors to be concerned for her sanity but actually delivered her to death’s door. The German theologian Johannes Nider (1380–1438) wrote what could have been scrupulosity in Consolation of a Timorous Conscience published in 1494 where he presented scrupulosity as a potentially lethal affliction which could generate the life-threatening sin of despair, in which he described a nun from Nuremberg named Kunegond who was in constant fear that her confession was insufficient. The theologian John of Dambach, who influenced Gerson considerably, plainly stated that many high-ranking people had become afraid of making decisions because of excessive scruples. It’s suggested he warned against the negative effects of too much scrupulosity. There is evidence that Jean Charlier de Gerson (1363–1429), the French scholar, educator, reformer, and Chancellor of the University of Paris was concerned with scrupulosity. Running through some of those historical and religious figures in chronological order. The use of the term dates back centuries, with several historical and religious figures suffering from doubts of sin, and expressing their obsessional suffering. The term is actually derived from the Latin ‘scrupulum’, a sharp stone, implying a stabbing pain on the conscience. Scrupulosity is a modern-day psychological problem that echoes the traditional use of the term ‘scruples’ in a religious context, to mean obsessive concern with one’s own sins and compulsive performance of religious devotion, where in earlier centuries it encompassed all types of obsessions and compulsions. Later in the seventeenth century, obsessions and compulsions were also described as symptoms of melancholy. So around this time, a new word for obsessions and compulsions came into usage, scrupulosity. Much of the earlier historical record of OCD descriptions are in the religious, rather than the medical literature, and what is clear from the cases we have found, is that from the in the 14th and 18th century, obsessional fears around religion were commonplace. Of course the name OCD did not come into being until the 20th century, but prior to that earlier references to symptoms we would now call Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder were surprisingly called scrupulosity. Finding early historical descriptions of OCD does exist, with some clear detailed likely cases dating back to the 14th century, some of which we will look at below. People experiencing problems with obsessions and compulsions (what we now call OCD) will have probably been around since people have been around. On the contrary, evidence shows numerous examples of OCD type symptoms in the lives of figures throughout the ages. The incidence of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis as it was once known, is a relatively common disorder and can be traced historically, cross-culturally and across a broad social spectrum and does not appear to restrict itself to any specific group of individuals.
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