In Mind Games, Eric Caplan documents conditions that influenced attitudes toward, and treatments of, mental illness in the United States at the turn of the last century. Caplan is a social historian at the University of Chicago and his volume provides a rich cultural context to developments in American medicine's attitude toward the treatment of mental disorders during the period 1880-1910.

The title of the book is whimsical, but the bit of fun Caplan makes of the medical establishment of a hundred years ago is good-natured enough. A tone of irony is sounded by such observations as Caplan makes when he writes of the inevitable mixture of motives among physicians during this 30-year period. For example,