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ISBN-10: 047115749X
ISBN-13: 9780471157496
Edition: 1996
List price: $30.00
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"[This book] provides a clear portrait of the evolution of psychiatric thinking over the past two centuries . . . sure to create an intellectual controversy . . . no one will be able to ignore the powerful argument." - Gerald N. Grob Henry E. Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine, Rutgers University "Written in a popular, lively, and often journalistic style [that] enunciates clear ideas and brave evaluations. . . . Shorter tells his story with immense panache, narrative clarity, and genuinely deep erudition." - Roy Porter Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine "A splendid work; this sparkling history is always strong, formidably rational, and clear." - Harold Merskey, DM… Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry University of Western Ontario "Zealot-researchers have seized the history of psychiatry to illustrate how their pet bugaboos-be they capitalism, patriarchy, or psychiatry itself-have converted protest into illness, locking into asylums those who otherwise would be challenging the established order. Although these trendy notions have attained great currency among intellectuals, they are incorrect in that they do not correspond to what happened in history." - Edward Shorter With these words, celebrated historian Edward Shorter fires the opening salvo of his provocative retelling of the history of psychiatry. Writing not as an apologist, but as a clear-sighted and exacting scholar, he traces the evolution of one of medicine2s most volatile disciplines, from its wild and woolly beginning amidst the din of eighteenth-century madhouses, through its more decorous twentieth-century incarnation among the soft lights of Park Avenue consulting offices, to what Shorter considers its present triumph as a bona fide medical specialty. With cinematic scope and precision, Shorter shows us the harsh, farcical, and inspiring realities of society2s changing attitudes toward its mentally ill and the efforts of generations of scientists and physicians to ease their suffering. He takes us inside the eighteenth-century asylums, with their restraints and beatings, and guides us through the landscaped boulevards of the spas and rest homes where the "nervous disorders" of the Victorian elite were treated with bromides, buttermilk, and kind words. He leads us through the teeming "snake pits" of early twentieth-century public mental hospitals and the gleaming laboratories of today2s pharmaceutical cartels. Writing in the tradition of the best social history, Shorter delineates the major scientific and cultural forces that shaped the development of psychiatry. Along the way, he paints vivid portraits of the leading figures-names such as Esquirol and Pinel, Krafft-Ebing and Kraepelin, Freud and Horney-who peopled the history of psychiatry. He pulls no punches in assessing the roles these men and women played in advancing our understanding of the biological origins of mental illness, or sidetracking psychiatry into pseudoscience, metaphysics, and fanaticism. An enthralling account of psychiatry from the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac, A History of Psychiatry is must reading for all behavioral scientists and for anyone interested in the history of a fascinating and influential medical specialty.