Tag: Psychiatry and Psychology
-
Book review: A History of Insanity and the Asylum
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Mental health topics have long been a source of fascination. In this new book, author Juliana Cummings explores the history of insanity and asylums from the Middle Ages to the modern era, revealing the sometimes-shocking treatment of people with mental illness over the centuries. Although the book is written from a…
-
Alfred Adler
JMS PearceHull, England The understanding of mental illness was barren until Freud’s time, scarcely risen from medieval notions of madness, moral inferiority, and witchcraft. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) began his career in histology and experimental physiology during six years spent in Ernst Brucke’s laboratory. He published a book on aphasia and was director of neurology at…
-
William Sargant
JMS PearceHull, England After the innovative psychology of Freud, Jung, and Adler there was little progress in knowledge either of psychological or organic mechanisms, or their treatment.1 Few psychiatrists had postgraduate training in clinical organic medicine, but William Walters Sargant (1907–1988) was an exception, trained as a physician and famed for physical treatments of mental…
-
Thomas Szasz
JMS PearceHull, England “[Mental illness] is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”—TS Szasz (1920–2012), “The myth of mental illness”1 In a discipline as diverse as medicine, it should occasion no surprise that odd characters, eccentrics, and unorthodox adventurers emerge…
-
Vincenzo Chiarugi, who freed the insane from their chains
Vincenzo Chiarugi was one of the pioneers of a more humane treatment of the mentally ill, along with William Tuke (1732–1822) in York and Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) and Étienne-Jean Georget (1795–1828) in Paris. They all lived at a time when those with mental illness were frequently confined in dungeons and ill-treated, chained to the wall,…
-
Henry Cotton: Pulling teeth to cure disease
Dr. Henry Cotton believed that all mental illnesses were caused by chronic “focal” infections hidden in various organs. He argued that when these infections spread to the brain, they caused inflammation and mental disorders. To cure these conditions, Cotton advocated the aggressive surgical removal of the infected organ, and for this achieved considerable fame in…
-
Margery Kempe: Medieval visions, delusions, and hallucinations
Margery Kempe (c. 1393 – after 1438) was an English Christian mystic who dictated autobiographic notes to a scribe. Married when twenty years old, she had a postpartum psychotic episode after the birth of her first child and went through at least fourteen subsequent pregnancies. Psychotic symptoms, delusions, and hallucinations continued all her life. She had…
-
Dancing with spiders: Tarantellas and tarantism
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “There are always hysterical people undergoing extraordinary cures.”– Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man The industrial city of Taranto is in the “heel” of boot-shaped Italy. The Romans called the city Tarentum,1 and part of its historical importance comes from its name. Confusion has also arisen from that name’s overuse. A traditional folk…