[Circular insanity, 150 years on].

On January 31 1854, Jules Baillarger delivered a lecture to the French Imperial Academy of Medicine describing a new variety of insanity, "la folie à double forme", whose main feature was the occurrence of both manic and depressive episodes in the same patient. Immediately his colleague Jean-Pierre Falret pointed out that he had already published a description of the same disorder, that he had named "folie circulaire" and, on February 14, presented a lecture on the subject to the Academy. Baillarger accused him of plagiarism, contending that Falret had used the two weeks between the two lectures to attribute the main characteristics of la folie à double forme to his folie circulaire, whose description now bore little relation to the (very short) previous report that Falret had evoked as proof of his priority.