On the fantastic apparitions of vision by Johannes Müller

Abstract

The history of the construction of the concept of hallucination remains biased in favour of the French contribution. Important to this history are the first 30 years of the nineteenth century for it was then that it was decided that hallucinations were: (1) primary disorders of perception; (2) the same class of phenomena, regardless of the sense modality in which they occurred; (3) generated by stimulation of brain regions related to perception and hence were mechanical responses with no semantic or informational import; and (4) medical problems. In 1826 Johannes Müller published a book on the fantastic phenomena of vision. Therein he proposed new rules for the description and explanation of hallucinations. Although published after Purkinje’s books on an analogous theme, and after Esquirol’s entry for the Panckoucke dictionary, Müller’s book served as one of the foundations for the new nineteenth-century speculative physiology and physiopathology of hallucinations. This way of conceptualizing these phenomena was to culminate in the irritation model proposed by Tamburini in the 1880s. This paper justifies the choice of Müller’s book as a classic text, provides biographical data about its author, and places the book in its historical context.