Sunday, August 14, 2005

Resources on the history of psychiatry

Resources on the History of Psychiatry
History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine
Emily Martin, Professor of Anthropology, New York University
Lorna A. Rhodes, Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington
August, 2004
Overview
This report introduces scholars interested in the history of psychiatry to the extraordinary collection in the HMD and NLM. This collection is unparalleled for its coverage of time and place in great depth and breadth, for its possession of immense numbers of unique audiovisual and print materials and for its invaluable holdings of manuscripts and oral histories. We have arranged our report in 10 major sections as listed below. Our time frame is primarily from the 19th century to the 1970s. For each major section we have organized items from the library in subsections by topic, date, location, or format. Within each subsection, we have listed only a small selection of materials available in the library, a selection we have chosen to illustrate the large range of sources the collection contains: scientific monographs, federal or state reports, personal accounts, conference proceedings, legal briefs, armed service publications, mass market publications, teaching materials, monographs on psychiatric ethics, treatment, or social effects, manuscripts, audiovisual materials, ephemera, and so on.
For a guide to the current scholarly literature on all these topics, the HMD web site contains an extremely useful set of syllabi used in teaching the history of psychiatry in the US and the UK. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/collections/digital/syllabi/index.html
Since by our reckoning, virtually all the contemporary texts and edited collections cited in these syllabi are available in the general collection of the NLM or the HMD, we have not provided a separate listing of these major contemporary scholarly resources here.
1. Overview…………………………………………….2
2. Prehistory of psychiatry……………………………...3
3. History of asylums…………………………………...6
4. History of psychotropic drugs………………………20
5. Race in psychiatry…………………………………...33
6. Women, children and the history of psychiatry……..36
7. Psychiatry, war, and violence………………………..43
8. Forensic psychiatry…………………………………..46
9. Radical cures: Psychosurgery and ECT……………...54

Monday, August 01, 2005

Treating Lovesickness

In the footnotes of his chapter on the Passions, in his last book Elements of Physiology, Denis Diderot presents a number of cases that he had heard about or read about. For example;
A young man feeling hopeless over not being able to obtain the object of his passion shot himself in the head with a pistol. He did not kill himself, but he remained mad from his wound; during his illness his relatives were advised to have his mistress come to him and to present her to him. When they did this, he raised his eyes, he saw her and he cried: Ah! mademoiselle it is you...and he was immediately cured [Diderot, Oeuvres Complètes, v. XVII, p. 489; translated by EMB]

another case of Lovesickness