History (4,530 posts)

Benjamin Rush’s twin 1786 letters on the different species of phobia and mania sit at an extended historical juncture at which an early modern quasi-medical troping of mental disorder in American social commentary sobered up to mental medicine. The letters’ satirical drive hinged on a perennial problem still occupying George Beard almost a century onward: which idiosyncratic trepidation or ill-grounded idea warranted the nomination of national and epochal ill? Rush’s mania letter exemplified an established genre identifying popular and especially political crazes; at the same time, it foreshadowed the early 19th-century rise and mid-century fall of monomania as forensic-nosological stopgap. The phobia text established the term’s dictionary (OED) sense of specific morbid fears, but did so in the form of a mobilisation of nosological jargon for social diagnostics purposes: an ambivalent prelude to Rush’s later formal engagement with unreasonable fears and follies. Both letters draw attention to a pervasive duality in early modern and Enlightenment conceptions of hydrophobia, aerophobia, syphilophobia and lyssophobia, between public-health and mental-hygienic follies.

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Working-class delinquent girls who were thought to be in need of long-term ‘reeducation’ could end up in the Dutch State Reform School for Girls. In the 1930s and 1940s girls were assessed by means of the Rorschach inkblot test after they were admitted. This psychological test, for which they had to tell the institutional psychologist what they saw in ten inkblot cards, served to assess how difficult or easy they would make life for the staff, and functioned to get them to behave well. It did so by creating the idea that the psychologist could look inside the girls, which forced them to look inside and wonder what it was that the psychologist could see.

Scholar of social work Viviene Cree examines “khaki fever” and a surprising response among women who decided they had to stop it.

This article will demonstrate the significant influence that psychiatric consultants exerted on the policy of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and, as a result, on cinematic representations of mental illness and psychiatric practices during what Arthur Marwick (2005) called the ‘long 1960s’.

Alfreda Barnett Duster (1904–1983) was a social worker and community activist in Chicago.

Volume 51, Issue 4, November 2020, Page 364-382
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AHP readers will be interested in a new article in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A: “Francis Galton’s regression towards mediocrity and the stability of types,”by Adam Krashniak and Ehud Lamm. Abstract: A prevalent narrative locates the discovery of the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean in the work of Francis … Continue reading Francis Galton’s regression towards mediocrity and the stability of types →

Journal of Planning History, Ahead of Print.
Since the early days of the planning profession, city agencies relied on a public health crisis narrative as a rationale for mass displacement efforts that targeted black communities. Over time, as cities gentrified with white, middle-class residents, the narrative shifted toward the city as a place of health. This article compares Atlanta’s redevelopment narratives from urban renewal to its current citywide greenway project, the BeltLine, to understand how city officials utilized public health language to rationalize displacement and how the narratives ran counter to residents’ lived experience.

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Volume 61, Issue 5-6, October – December 2020, Page 486-502
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History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print.
In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis ‘psychosis of civilization’ appeared in some psychiatrists’ writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming ‘like’ Europeans – a goal to which they seem to aspire – but too far from their ‘ancestral habits’ to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers.

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Charlotte Towle. Laurin Hyde and Wilman Walker

Philipe Pinel (1745-1826) was a French alienist (psychiatrist) who pioneered a more humane approach to the cuistory and care of those with mental illness.