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With cinematic scope and precision, Shorter shows us the harsh, farcical, and inspiring realities of society's 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 today's 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.
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Edition | Availability |
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1
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
March 3, 1998, Wiley
in English
0471245313 9780471245315
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2
A history of psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac
1997, John Wiley & Sons
in English
047115749X 9780471157496
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3
A history of psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac
1997, John Wiley & Sons
in English
047115749X 9780471157496
|
zzzz
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WorldCat
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4
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
December 13, 1996, John Wiley & Sons
in English
047115749X 9780471157496
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Book Details
First Sentence
"Before the end of the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as psychiatry."
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- Created April 29, 2008
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August 6, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 14, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Linked existing covers to the edition. |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |