The development of the concept of personhood

pp. 13-18

in: David C. Thomasma, David N. Weisstub, Christian Hervé, Personhood and health care, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

The history of words is passionate and surprising and it is not uncommon to find terms that originally had a pejorative meaning develop through time towards a mainly positive one. Tolerance, for example, now signifies an essential quality of democracy, but for a long time it signified a humiliating attitude, one tolerated what one could not prevent. Likewise, the adjectives "gothic" and "baroque" were originally contemptuous.