Discovering the History of Psychiatry edited by Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter New York:  Oxford University Press, 1994,  xii + 466 pp., $47.50

It is only within the last few years that the history of psychiatry has started to become established on secure academic grounds. For many years medical history in general was more or less consigned to the concerns and hobbies of retired physicians; but lately it has been possible to conceive of people pursuing an interest in the history of psychiatry not only at the outset of their academic careers, but as a means of normal professional advancement. The journal The History of Psychiatry, which is only a few years old, has been a strikingly excellent supplement to more well-known quarterlies such as the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the Journal of the History of Medicine, the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and Social History of Medicine.

The Introduction to Discovering the History of Psychiatry, by the two editors, is especially fine and holds up a high standard for the rest of the text. Porter has been prolific in the past and published so many books, articles, and reviews, all of an exceptionally original character, that he has become a scholarly phenomenon in his own right. Micale is an unusually promising young historian now teaching at Yale and an expert on the history of the concept of hysteria. Porter is Associate Director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. The subtitle of their introduction here is “Reflections on Psychiatry and Its Histories,” which spells out the pluralistic tolerance of their perspective. They want this book “to explore the peculiar, complex, and powerful interplay between psychiatry, historiography, and social, cultural, and political ideology” (p. 4). Micale and Porter are sensitive to the existence of competing schools of thought that have been bitterly at odds with one another. And the editors are determined to ensure that the history of psychiatric medicine does not fall into any one partisan camp.