Psychiatry and its History

Psychiatry and its History, .ed. by GEORGE MORA and JEANNE L. BRAND, Springfield, Illinois, C. C. Thomas, 1970, pp. xviii, 283, $9.00. In 1967 a workshop was held at Yale University on the Methodological Problems involved in the study of the History of Psychiatry. Despite the immediate suspicion aroused by any meeting concemed with Methodology, a subject which all too often conceals a total ignorance of the discipline itself, the workshop proved a valuable experience by nature of the contributions which a number of distinguished medical historians presented to the participants. Now these deliberations are presented to a wider audience in a book form. Two attitudes may be taken to a discussion of methodology, first, that medical history is a living subject, without a knowledge of which the daily practice of medicine is no more than an arid, technical procedure. As such, the human, individual approach of the doctor to the history of his subject may be more rewarding than if too much attention is paid to the historiographical elements of the craft. The second attitude is that without a vigorous attention to the historical methods of today much of what is written by the amateur is of little value, and what is almost implicit in this view, is that a training in such methods is necessary or even essential for the writing of medical history. In perhaps the wisest of all the communications in this book, Ilza Veith sympathetically deals with this dilemma, and with her broad-ranging intelligence and lack of intellectual arrogance, provides in a few pages encouragement to all those amateur historians who might so easily be deterred from ever putting pen to paper. There is room for both approaches, she argues, for the specialist such as herself, who has perforce to deal with primary sources only, written in a language with which the historian must be conversant, and also for the physician psychiatrist who brings to the subject his own knowledge of his speciality. All the contributors agree that facts must be the basis of historical research, and that means referral to primary sources; that judgment of the facts must be sound and well based, and that inter-disciplinary co-operation in such a wide-ranging subject as psychiatry is perhaps more necessary than in some other fields of medical history. As with all such co-operative efforts, the individual contributions are of differing value for the individual reader; the overall message of the book is one that Francis Braceland, in his wise and gentle foreward, sums up as the provision of the necessary guideposts to the writing of medical history. DENIS LEIGH