History (4,530 posts)

Volume 62, Issue 2, April 2021, Page 166-185
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A saloon in the Devil’s Half Acre

The She-She-She camp in Pittsfield, N.H.

History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ (mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ (unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

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The new edited volume, Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness, may interest AHP readers. Edited by Robert Ellis, Sarah Kendal, and Steven J. Taylor, the book is described as follows: This book presents new perspectives on the multiplicity of voices in the histories of mental ill-health. … Continue reading Voices in the History of Madness: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness →

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A new piece in Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne by Jennifer Bazar and Christopher Green will interest AHP readers: “How Canada’s first psychology department arose at McGill University.” Abstract: Canada’s first official department of psychology came into existence at Montréal’s McGill University in 1924. First chartered more than a century before, in 1821, McGill started teaching courses … Continue reading How Canada’s first psychology department arose at McGill University →

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Richard M Titmuss (1960)

One reason why the Rand researchers knew their findings might be controversial was the reaction to an audacious and for the time methodologically advanced experiment conducted by husband and wife team of Drs. Mark and Linda Sobell (above), results from which had been published in 1973.

Firefighters tackling the blaze at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, New York City, March 25, 1911