First edition of this pioneering work in psychiatry. For Lorry, melancholic people do not all have a fixed and unique idea, and melancholy is a state of mental disorder of physical origin, where the mind, strongly disturbed by objects either external or forged by the imagination, becomes incapable of resisting the ideas that derive from it, of pushing them away, of reasoning with them. He recognizes two species, depending on the origin in solids or humors, and he names the first nervous melancholy, the second humoral melancholy. Lorry was very renowned as a practitioner in Paris and he was called upon to bleed Louis XV in his last illness. Editions in this condition -- fine and in lovely calf bindings -- are scarce.