Reviewed by: Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture by Lucas Richert Wendy Kline Lucas Richert. Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019. 210 pp. Ill. $26.95 (978-0-262-04282-6). Historians Beth Bailey and David Farber once referred to the 1970s as "our strangest decade." Unlike scholarship on the...
Reviewed by: The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America by Matthew Oram Nicolas Rasmussen Matthew Oram. The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. xiv + 269 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-1-4214-2620-4). The colorful history of the hallucinogen LSD has attracted the attention of numerous historians of medicine,...
Reviewed by: Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada by Erika Dyck, Alex Deighton Ian Dowbiggin Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton. Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018. xiv + 321 pp. Ill. $31.95 (978–0–88755–795–8). On December 29, 1921, a...
Reviewed by: Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux Toby Gelfand Jan Goldstein . Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. xi + 246 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-691-01186-8). Nanette Leroux, an eighteen-year-old French peasant girl, fell gravely ill in the summer of 1822 with a bewildering array of nervous...
On the eve of deinstitutionalization, a group of professionals, including an architect, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist, joined together in pursuit of a middle ground between outright closure of long-stay hospitals and the introduction of out-patient services in general hospitals. Augmented by the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, these men produced a trenchant critique of modern...
Reviewed by: The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation György E. Szönyi Urszula Szulakowska. The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation. Aries Book Series: Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill, 2006. xii + 180 pp. Ill. $155.00, €119.00 (ISBN-10:...
The idea of a conflict between demonology and psychiatry has been a foundational myth in the history of medicine. Nineteenth-century alienists such as J.-M. Charcot and Henry Maudsley developed critiques of supernatural phenomena in an attempt to pathologize religious experience. Modern historians have reanalyzed these critiques, representing them as strategies in medical professionalization....
Reviewed by: Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline Karen Reeds Richard Evans Schultes and Siri von Reis, eds. Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 1995. 414 pp. Ill. $49.95. As a word, ethnobotany is just a century old: it was coined by the American taxonomic botanist John W. Harshberger in 1895. As a discipline, it is barely a half-century old. Since 1941,...