I am developing a stress diathesis model of suicidality, and would be gretaful with information about the historical usage of this concept.

-- Dr Paul Brown (drpaulb@optus.com.au), May 20, 2003

Answers

I found a variety of meanings for diathesis in Hinsie & Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary (4th ed., Oxford University Press, 1970). They reference 'diathesis' in N. Pende, Constitutional Inadequacies tr. by Nacarrati. Phhiladelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1928. They also reference traumatophilic diasthesis in in Otto Fenichel's 1945 THe Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. The other definitions come from medicine, and do not include references.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), May 21, 2003.

OED says:

diathesis di,æ;þisis. Pl. diatheses -iz. mod.L., a. Gr. diaqesij disposition, state, condition, f. diatiqenai to arrange, dispose.

Med. A permanent (hereditary or acquired) condition of the body which renders it liable to certain special diseases or affections; a constitutional predisposition or tendency.

1681 tr. Willis' Rem. Med. Wks. Vocab., Diathesis, the affection or disposition.

1727-51 Chambers Cycl., Diathesis, a term used by some writers in the same sense with constitution.

1789 A. Crawford in Med. Commun. II. 349 The..barytes is..calculated to correct the scrophulous diathesis.

1879 Farrar St. Paul I. 490 The epileptic diathesis which was the qualification of the Pythonesses of Delphi.

1885 F. Warner Phys. Expression xvi. 275 The tendencies in the development of a child or adult may be studied by determining the diathesis, as it is called.

b. fig.

1651 Biggs New Disp. P236 An exotick Diathesis of corruption.

1861 Maine Anc. Law ix. (1876) 340 Enormous influence on the intellectual diathesis of the modern world.

1874 Blackie Self-Cult. 90 Practically, there is no surer test of a man's moral diathesis than the capacity of prayer.

1877 F. Hall Eng. Adj. in -able 173 Helpless slaves of what a metaphysician might call the sequacious diathesis.

Hence

diathesisation

di'athesi'sation, `the rendering general or systemic of an originally local disease; as the development into pyæmia of a simple abscess'; Syd. Soc. Lex. 1883.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), May 21, 2003.