A History of Psychiatry

EDWARD SHORTER, PhD, is Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is the author of ten books, including the international bestseller The Making of the Modern Family and a two-volume history of psychosomatic illness.

Preface 1 The Birth of Psychiatry vii A World without Psychiatry 1 Traditional Asylums 4 Heralding the Therapeutic Asylum 8 Organizing the Therapeutic Asylum 18 Nervous Illness and Nonpsychiatrists 22 Toward a Biological Psychiatry 26 Romantic Psychiatry 29 2 The Asylum Era 33 National Traditions 34 The Pressure of Numbers 46 Why the Increase? 48 Redistribution of Illness 49 Rising Rate of Psychiatric Illness 53 Dead End 65 3 The First Biological Psychiatry 69 Enter Ideas 69 A German Century 71 French Disasters 81 Anglo-Saxon Laggards 87 Degeneration 93 The End of the First Biological Psychiatry 99 An American Postscript 109 4 Nerves 113 Nerves Better than Madness 114 The Flight of Madness into the Spa 119 Tired Nerves and the Rest Cure 129 Neurology Discovers Psychotherapy 136 5 The Psychoanalytic Hiatus 145 Freud and His Circle 146 The Battle Begins 154 American Origins 160 The Arrival of the Europeans 166 Triumph 170 Psychoanalysis and the American Jews 181 6 Alternatives 190 Fever Cure and Neurosyphilis 192 Early Drugs 196 Prolonged Sleep 200 Shock and Coma 207 Electroshock 218 The Lobotomy Adventure 225 Social and Community Psychiatry 229 7 The Second Biological Psychiatry 239 The Genetic Strand 240 The First Drug That Worked 246 The Cornucopia 255 Neuroscience 262 Antipsychiatry 272 Return to "the Community" 277 The Battle over ECT 281 8 From Freud to Prozac 288 Maintaining Market Share 289 A Nation Hungers for Psychotherapy 293 Science versus Fashion in Diagnosis 295 The Decline of Psychoanalysis 305 Cosmetic Psychopharmacology 314 Why Psychiatry? 325 Notes 329 Index 421