Review by Choice Review
Psychiatry, like sausage and law, is at once necessary and basically good, but just how it was made makes an unseemly tale. Shorter (Univ. of Toronto) provides a wonderful narrative of the development of modern psychiatry from the asylum era of the late 18th and 19th centuries, where souls tormented by major psychoses were often provided with little more than restraint and seclusion as treatment, to the recent advent of mind-altering pharmaceuticals (i.e., Thorazine, Valium, Prozac, etc.) that have wrought considerable hope accompanied by great problems. Shorter is at his best as he recounts the origins of what E.S. Valenstein has termed Great and Desperate Cures (CH, Jul'86), i.e., lobotomy, insulin coma therapy, bromide sleep, etc. The author argues that late-20th-century psychiatry has rid itself of the myriad quackeries and fads of the past and reawakened to the realization that the abnormal mind rests upon a scientific understanding of its biological substrates. There is little doubt that major psychiatric illness is best understood from this viewpoint, but his case may be overstated: one wonders if the madness manifest in, say, the Oklahoma City bombing, or the suicides of the Heaven's Gate cult, will ever be reducible to brain chemistry. Highly recommended. General readers; undergraduates through professionals. W. B. Dragoin; Georgia Southwestern State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Shorter's social history of 200 years of psychiatry in the U.S., Great Britain, France, and Germany is informative and at times lively. It begins with the asylums of the eighteenth century, showing that they did some good until they were overwhelmed by increasing numbers of patients. The first round of biological psychiatry in the nineteenth century involved initial attempts to connect mental conditions with parts of the body; with this material Shorter does particularly well as he compares, in terms of both theories and treatments, the centralized national system of psychiatry in France with the separate institutes and private clinics in Germany. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of patients' power when diagnoses of "madness" were refused and preference given those of various "nervous conditions." As for psychoanalysis, Shorter pillories it and then delineates the second round of biological psychiatry involving genetics and the growth of neuroscience. Dealing ably with the major trends, Shorter does not fail to also illuminate such engaging and horrifying byways as the "fever cure" and ice pick lobotomy. --William Beatty
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Shorter cites recent research indicating that adult-onset schizophrenia is genetically influenced and often traceable to uterine trauma or difficult birth. In his view, brain biology and genetics underlie much mental illness, and biological psychiatry-combining drugs with psychotherapy-has replaced Freudian psychoanalysis as the dominant paradigm for explaining and treating a host of disorders. In this richly informative, iconoclastic, sure-to-be-controversial chronicle, Shorter, professor of the history of medicine at the University of Toronto, argues that Freud, by turning psychoanalysis into a movement instead of a method of objective inquiry, fostered a stifling orthodoxy, therapists' arrogance toward patients and scientific stagnation. He defends electroshock as a valuable tool in the treatment of depression; identifies German physician Emil Kraepelin, systematizer of diagnoses-rather than Freud-as the central figure in the history of psychiatry; and dismisses as unhistorical nonsense Michel Foucault's theory that psychiatry arose in a collusion between capitalism and the state as a means to control deviant individuals. While this study won't end the nature-versus-nurture debate, it mounts a formidable challenge to strict adherents of the talking therapies. Photos. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The view of psychiatry held by both insiders and the general public has changed considerably in the past few decades, in ways that Shorter (From the Mind into the Body, LJ 11/1/93) both acknowledges and celebrates. For the most part, psychiatrists have moved from what Shorter calls the "Freudian Interlude" to a role as gatekeepers of psychopharmaceuticals. Shorter covers psychiatry's birth as an attempt to create "mental asylums" as places of refuge. This attempt, argues the author, capsized because new major psychiatric illnesses (notably neurosyphilis and schizophrenia) arose in the 19th century, deluging the asylums. Young psychiatrists turned to Freudian analysis to earn a living by treating less sick and more financially secure patients. This "interlude" ended because analysis has become too expensive at the very time that psychiatric drugs have become available. While the book is a bit dry in places, it covers a great deal of fascinating material, making this a good choice for academic libraries and larger public libraries with a clientele interested in social history.Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, Wash. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An opinionated, anecdote-rich history of a branch of medicine strongly shaped by culture. Canadian physician and medical historian Shorter (Univ. of Toronto) begins his lively account by describing the horrific treatment of the mentally ill before the advent of the custodial asylum. It was, he says, the discovery that asylums could have a therapeutic role that led to the birth of psychiatry at the end of the 18th century. Shorter examines the failure of the therapeutic asylum movement, attributing it largely to an overwhelming number of inmates in the 19th century. Always divided by two visions of mental illness, one finding its origins in the biology of the brain and the other looking to psychosocial factors, psychiatry was dominated by the biological view throughout the 19th century. Shorter presents the German physician Emil Kraepelin, who revolutionized the approach to categorizing and diagnosing mental illnesses, as the central figure in ending the sway of biological psychiatry. As for Freud, says Shorter, ``His doctrine of psychoanalysis, based on intuitive leaps of fantasy, did not stand the test of time.'' Citing studies indicating that the majority of American psychoanalysts and their patients were Jewish, the author links the growing social assimilation of Jews (and their abandonment of their ``encapsulated little subculture'') with the post-'60s decline in popularity of psychoanalysis--a theory sure to arouse controversy. Shorter chronicles the discovery of the various drugs that formed the pharmacological basis of the new biological psychiatry and hails the alliance of psychiatrists with geneticists, biochemists, and other scientists that has brought the scientific method to the investigation of mental illness. Where does psychiatry go from here? Shorter predicts a combination of the neuroscientific and the psychotherapeutic, that is, a blend of ``neurochem'' and ``neurochat.'' While psychiatrists may quibble and Freudians and other psychoanalysts will surely squawk, those without a vested interest will be thoroughly entertained and certainly enlightened.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
