Between doctrine and clinical practice: nosography and semiology in the work of Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840).

This paper makes a fresh analysis of the work of the French alienist J. E. D. Esquirol. In addition to a critical study of his classification of mental diseases, it analyses his main contributions to semiology: the difference between hallucinations and illusions, etc., and it also places the psychiatric clinic into the context of the so-called anatomoclinical mentality.