You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It was time that someone wrote this book and put into a historical perspective the tremendous volume of work being done and reported on nowadays and in recent decades. To be more than mere technicians we have to know something of how the patient's culture, his society, can influence his life and symptoms as well as our own concepts. This history gives a great deal of that kind of information, by describing in detail the variations and vicissitudes of one particular disease, symptom complex, syndrome, or illness, over the past 2500 years.
This is an eminently scholarly work, easy to read and rich with interesting quotations and anecdotes. It is hard to put down. I find myself going back to it again and again for its clinical interest and even more for the lively insight it gives into the way people actually lived and felt over the 2½ millenia the author covers in this guided historical tour. It will interest practitioners for its accounts of diagnosis and treatment; it will interest lay persons for its unique view of the growth of Western civilization. But its particular value is in its exposition of the reality of the basic human experience we now call depression, but known over the centuries as melancholia.
Dr Jackson is very well qualified to perform the task of interpreting this material. He is a psychoanalyst, past president of the Western New England Society and Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is Director of the Division of Outpatient Services at the Connecticut Mental health Center. In addition, he is Professor of Psychiatry and History of Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. An initial statement suggests a humane purpose in this work: 'A professional lifetime of interest in and efforts to ameliorate the distress of various sufferers, many of them depressed, gradually became joined with an associated professional lifetime of attention to the history of medicine in general and the history of psychiatry in particular'. The insight and i