okay sorry for bad typing, but! here are some historical things about ocd:
up until super recently, it was called stuff like obsessional illness, obsessional/obsessive-compulsive neurosis, religious melancholy for that kind of scrupulosity, or obsessional rumination. i think it was also seen as a ~doubting disease~ but that may be more modern.
it was also kinda seen as a special type of depression in some cases! which is interesting as the comorbidity of mood disorders and ocd is. very common.
you can find a lot of examples of people throughout history who seem like they had it - this book mentions john bunyan, charles darwin, howard hughes, samuel johnson, martin luther, and nikola tesla
let’s look at the case studies from the book “obsessions and compulsions” by stanley j. rachman and ray j. hodgson, because they’re interesting (theyre all in europe, unfortunately, but i’ll see if i can find anything else later)
we have a man named william of oseney, who was very devout and spent a lot of time reading religious texts. he had three hours a day of study, and read each book three times. then he doubled this to six hours/six times, then to twelve hours/twelve times. jeremy taylor wrote about this in 1660.
we have a case study from 1757 by john woodard of a woman developing ocd symptoms after giving birth. she was very afraid a porpoise she saw in a river would “mark her child” and she couldn’t get rid of the thought. she also had harm-related thoughts about her children, which is still very common
in 1895, henry maudsley wrote a special group of “simple melancholy” patients who had “morbid impulses”. he notes that “the essence of the misery is not always so much the fear of actually yielding to it as the haunting fear of the fear” and mentions a few cases of harm ocd.
he also says this: “bad as the impulses are, worst still perhaps is the persistent intrusion of evil thoughts, horrible and detestable, into the mind, despite the most earnest wish to turn and keep them out.” this looks to me like it could be an early usage of the idea of intrusive thoughts
we have knowledge that back in the day, the majority of people we would now say had contamination-related ocd worried about getting the plague, then syphilis, and now cancer. we actually have evidence of a woman intensely afraid of syphilis when young, then cancer as she got older
