DOI: 10.1097/01.nmd.0000349941.63466.c0
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Issn Print: 0022-3018
Publication Date: 2009/04/01
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Excerpt
Lillian R. Furst (2008). Lewisburg (PA): Bucknell University Press. pp. 207.
This is a collection of psychiatric case histories first published between 1869 and 1894. For the most part they have been translated from German or French with the aim of making primary documents accessible to English speaking scholars.
The book’s 5 sections present work by George Beard, Richard Krafft-Ebing, Arthur Schnitzler, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Pierre Janet. Each begins with detailed information about the author emphasizing the significance of his ideas and methods in the context of his time. Psychiatric case histories, crystallized into their 19th century forms, reflected progressive modifications in the conceptualization of mental illness. After centuries of being regarded as possessed or demonized, mentally ill individuals began to be regarded as humans with a comprehensible affliction who were engaged in a relationship with a physician. That is they were now in the status of “patient.” The introductory essays make it possible for nonclinician as well as clinician readers to place the case histories within the trajectories both of the developing profession of psychiatry and of public interest in the mind. As they were influenced by contemporary culture and social structure this volume can be read as social history.
