American Madness
American Madness

Author: Richard Noll

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-10-24

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0674062655

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1895 there was not a single case of dementia praecox reported in the United States. By 1912 there were tens of thousands of people with this diagnosis locked up in asylums, hospitals, and jails. By 1927 it was fading away . How could such a terrible disease be discovered, affect so many lives, and then turn out to be something else? In vivid detail, Richard Noll describes how the discovery of this mysterious disorder gave hope to the overworked asylum doctors that they could at last explain—though they could not cure—the miserable patients surrounding them. The story of dementia praecox, and its eventual replacement by the new concept of schizophrenia, also reveals how asylum physicians fought for their own respectability. If what they were observing was a disease, then this biological reality was amenable to scientific research. In the early twentieth century, dementia praecox was psychiatry’s key into an increasingly science-focused medical profession. But for the moment, nothing could be done to help the sufferers. When the concept of schizophrenia offered a fresh understanding of this disorder, and hope for a cure, psychiatry abandoned the old disease for the new. In this dramatic story of a vanished diagnosis, Noll shows the co-dependency between a disease and the scientific status of the profession that treats it. The ghost of dementia praecox haunts today’s debates about the latest generation of psychiatric disorders.

Sapphic Slashers
Sapphic Slashers

Author: Lisa Duggan

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2001-01-10

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 082238101X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the ensuing “girl lovers” murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and shows how newly “modern” notions of normality and morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the present day. Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media—and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism—Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward’s murder, the trial, and Mitchell’s eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime. Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.