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This richly illustrated survey of American medical and cultural views of mental illness spans the years from the 17th century to 1914 and
the early impact of the new psychiatry of Freud and Adolf Meyer. The illustrations, from a remarkable variety of sources, many of them published together for the first time, provide much of the excitement and fascination of this elegantly produced volume, which inaugurates a new Cornell series in the history of psychiatry. There are photographs of patient art from the 18th and 19th centuries, of asylum dances, of nurses doing improving exercises at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, of Benjamin West's monumental painting, Christ Healing the Sick, of hypnotists and their subjects as well as advertisements for headache pills and phrenological apparatus. The very competent text pays considerable attention to the concerns of women, to racial and sexual issues, and to patients' perceptions of their treatment. Sometimes present-day indignation over past injustices, sexual or racial, overtakes the narrative. Then, there is an obscure argument about the “nonverbal” characteristics of modern art and the suggestion that attention to semiotics has swept the psychoanalytic field. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise compact and well-argued text. Freud's innovations in giving “a precise meaning to psychological cause and effect” are sympathetically placed in the context of the problems of somatic psychiatry toward the close of the 19th century. This book provides a handsome, useful encounter with the changing social definitions of mental illness and its remedies.