Three hundred years of psychiatry 1535–1860

RICHARD HUNTER and IDA MACALPINE, Three hundred years ofpsychiatry 15351860, [reprint], Hartsdale, NY, Carlisle Publishing Inc., 1982, 8vo, pp. xxvi, 1107, illus., $95.00. Three hundred years ofpsychiatry is without doubt one of the best books ever produced on the history of psychiatry. Most collections of extracts are at most useful for casual browsing and conveying a flavour of original sources. "Hunter and Macalpine", as it tends to be called, performs those functions, but it does much more. It was so generously conceived and intelligently executed that it is simultaneously a book of readings and a genuine research tool. The focus is Britain, and the documents were selected from a rich variety of sources: extracts from standard and obscure medical and psychiatric writers like Burton, Willis, Battie, and Conolly lie side by side with selections from diaries, letters, sermons, Acts of Parliament, and newspaper advertisements. Each of the 250 separate entries arranged chronologically is prefaced with a biographical or historical exegesis, indicating its significance and placing it in its social context. The extracts were selected with care, and their historical placements were impeccably researched and presented. The result was not simply to provide materials for a history of psychiatry in Britain from 1535 to 1860, but a brilliant version of that history. The majority of both printed and manuscript material reproduced in this book came from the remarkable library which the late authors (mother and son) had assembled. Ida Macalpine died in 1974; following Richard Hunter's tragic and premature death in 1981, scholars were glad to learn that the library was to be sold intact. It has since been acquired by the Cambridge University Library where it is presently being catalogued and made accessible to scholars. Originally published in 1963, "Hunter and Macalpine" has been out of print for a number of years and has become increasingly difficult to obtain. Happily, the present reprint again makes it available, though unfortunately not at a bargain price. At least it is well printed and bound. Announced as a "corrected" reprint, the nature and number of the corrections are not specified; they appear to be minor. W. F. Bynum Wellcome Institute