Madness, as a form of suffering, has existed as long as humankind. Only in the nineteenth century did it come under the aegis of medicine, giving rise to the birth of psychiatry/alienism as a discipline. Prior to this, madness had attracted the attention of many agents, including the Church, medics, philosophers, and others. During the seventeenth century in the context of secularization, the scientific revolution, and other factors, it began to be viewed as a natural kind and thereby a medical object. In the nineteenth century, the medicalization of madness was further associated with a growth of mental asylums, enabling alienists to observe patients longitudinally, to classify their complaints, and to construct the language for the description/construction/capture of mental symptoms, namely, descriptive psychopathology. In contrast to the signs available to medical doctors, alienists had to develop different clinical criteria, and the emerging social sciences became the natural source for these. Thus, from the beginning, descriptive psychopathology was a hybrid construct, incorporating the frameworks of both the natural sciences and the social sciences. The tension resulting from this incongruent union has persisted ever since and contributed to the polarities in current conceptions of mental disorders as well as the challenges facing psychiatry today.