Burlington Public Library MA

Madness in America, cultural and medical perceptions of mental illness before 1914, Lynn Gamwell, Nancy Tomes

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 174-176) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Madness in America

bibliography

31754587

Lynn Gamwell, Nancy Tomes

Cornell studies in the history of psychiatry

cultural and medical perceptions of mental illness before 1914

In this book, Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes explore the historical roots of Americans' understanding of madness today. Drawing on a rich array of sources, the authors interweave the perceptions of medical practitioners, the mentally ill and their families, and journalists, poets, novelists, and artists. As they trace successive ways of explaining madness and treating those judged insane, Gamwell and Tomes vividly depict the political and cultural dimensions of American attitudes toward mental illness. Gamwell and Tomes observe telling differences in the ways in which patients of different genders, races, and classes have been diagnosed and treated. The authors demonstrate how definitions of madness figured in national debates over abolitionism, women's rights, and alternative medicine. Madness in America also considers how the boundaries between sanity and insanity have been repeatedly redrawn in such areas as sexual behavior and criminality

Madness and the asylum in early America : the seventeenth century to the 1810s -- The asylum in Antebellum America : the 1820s to the 1860s -- American nervousness : 1870 to 1914

Cultural and medical perceptions of mental illness before 1914