Conflicting models of selfhood have become central to debates over modern medicine. Yet we still lack a clear historical account of how this psychological sensibility came to be established. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970 will remedy this situation by demonstrating that there is nothing inevitable about the current connection between health, identity and personal history. It traces the changing conception of the psyche in Britain over the last two centuries and it demonstrates how these changes were rooted in transformed patterns of medical care. The shifts from private medicine through to National Insurance and the National Health Service fostered different kinds of relationship between doctor and patient and different understandings of psychological distress. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970 examines these transformations and, in so doing, provides new critical insights into our modern sense of identity and changing notions of health that will be of great value to anyone interested in the modern history of British medicine.
This book charts the journey of British General Practitioners (GPs) towards professional self-realisation through the development of a political consciousness manifested in a series of bruising encounters with government. GPs are an essential part of the social fabric of modern Britain but as a group have always felt undervalued, clashing with successive governments over the terms on which they offered their services to the public. Explaining the background to these disputes and the motives of GPs from a sociological perspective, this research casts new light on some defining moments in the creation of the modern British state, from National Health Insurance to the National Health Service, and the history of the British medical profession. It examines these events from the point of view of the professionals intimately involved in and affected by them, using both established sources, like Ministry of Health records, an in-depth analysis of rarely studied records of professional bodies, and previously unresearched archive material. The result is a fascinating account of conflict and cooperation, and of heroic, and less-than-heroic, defiance of political authority, involving interactions between complex personalities and competing ideologies. Scholarly yet readable, this book will be of interest to the general reader as much as to medical practitioners and historians.
This book is open access under a CC BY license and explores the under-researched history of male mental illness from the mid-twentieth century. It argues that statistics suggesting women have been more vulnerable to depression and anxiety are misleading since they underplay a host of alternative presentations of 'distress' more common in men.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the purpose of history for psychology. Its purpose is to ask why history should be of concern to psychologists in teaching and research, and in theory and in practice. The future position of humanities subjects is currently highly debated on all fronts. Chapters focus on the arguments from psychologists, upgrade the precision and quality of discussion, and thus, provide a base for affirming the place of history of psychology in the broad field of psychological activity. A fundamental question dominates the discussion. Is the purpose of the history of psychology to serve current psychology, rather than to contribute to historical knowledge – and to enter large debates about what historical knowledge means for being human? If the answer is yes, as most psychologists who come to the issues will presume, in what ways? Are these ways philosophically grounded, or do the social and political conditions of power and funding in universities dominate the arguments? In this volume, the contributors demonstrate the relation between historical investigations and current practice. Featured topics include: The history of psychology and its relation to feminism. The history of psychology and its relation to current research assessment and curriculum. The history of science and its relation to psychology. The metalanguage for psychology. Case studies of history in theory construction. Centrality of History for Theory Construction in Psychology will be of interest to psychologists, professors, graduate psychology students, and scholars in the human sciences.
"This book explores the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of madness was subjected to an economically saturated style of psychiatric reasoning. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether patients, such as eccentrics, appeared capable of managing their financial affairs and money, psychiatrists could often circumvent uncertainties about a person's psychiatric health. What we learn is how in psychiatry an economic lens was used to reveal mental illness and uncover the hidden economic value of pathology itself. The psychiatric turn to economic reasoning signaled a transformation of the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic. For the differences between the most common forms of social valuation-moral value, medical value, and economic value-were flattened and rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy was increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed, and even revered"--
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. What is autism and where has it come from? Increased diagnostic rates, the rise of the 'neurodiversity' movement, and growing autism journalism, have recently fuelled autism's fame and controversy. The metamorphosis of autism is the first book to explain our current fascination with autism by linking it to a longer history of childhood development. Drawing from a staggering array of primary sources, Bonnie Evans traces autism back to its origins in the early twentieth century and explains why the idea of autism has always been controversial and why it experienced a 'metamorphosis' in the 1960s and 1970s. Evans takes the reader on a journey of discovery from the ill-managed wards of 'mental deficiency' hospitals, to high-powered debates in the houses of parliament, and beyond. The book will appeal to a wide market of scholars and others interested in autism.
Historians and biographers of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology, medicine and culture, even Wikipedia, believe Ernest Jones discovered Freud in 1904 and had become the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis by 1906. Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893–1913 offers radically different versions to that monolithic Account propagated by Jones over 70 years ago. Detailed readings of the contemporaneous literature expose the absurdities of Jones’s claim, arguing that he could not have been using psychoanalysis until after he exiled himself to Canada in September 1908. Removing Jones reveals vibrant British cultures of ‘Mind Healing’ which serve as backdrops for widespread interest in Freud. First; the London Psychotherapeutic Society whose volunteer staff of mesmerists, magnetists, hypnotists and spiritualists offered free psycho-therapeutic treatments. Then the wondrous Walford Bodie, who wrought his free ‘miraculous cures,’ on and off the music-hall stage, to adoring and hostile audiences alike. Then the competing religious and spiritual groups actively promoting their own faith healings, often in reaction to fears of Christian Science but often cow-towing to orthodox medical and clerical orthodoxies. From this strange milieu emerged medically qualified practitioners, like Edwin Ash, Betts Taplin, and Douglas Bryan, who embraced hypnotism and psychotherapy. From 1904 British Medical Journals began discussing Freud’s work and by 1908 psychiatrists, working in lunatic asylums, were already testing and applying his theories in the treatment of patients. The medically qualified psychotherapists, who formed the Medical Society for the Study of Suggestive Therapeutics, soon joined with medical members from the Society for Psychical Research in discussing, proselytizing, and practising psychoanalysis. Thus when Jones returned to London, in late summer 1913, there were thriving psychotherapeutic cultures with talk of Freud and psychoanalysis occupying medical journals and conferences. Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893–1913, with its meticulous research, wide sweep of vision and detailed understanding of the subtle inter-connections between the orthodox and the unorthodox, the lay and the medical, the social and the biographical, as well as the byzantine complexities of British medical politics, will radically alter your understanding of how those early twentieth century ‘Mind Healing’ debates helped shape the ways in which the ‘talking cure’ first started infiltrating our lives.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Through its study of diabetes care in twentieth-century Britain, Managing diabetes, managing medicine offers the first historical monograph to explore how the decision-making and labour of medical professionals became subject to bureaucratic regulation and managerial oversight. Where much existing literature has cast health care management as either a political imposition or an assertion of medical control, this work positions managerial medicine as a co-constructed venture. Although driven by different motives, doctors, nurses, professional bodies, government agencies and international organisations were all integral to the creation of managerial systems, working within a context of considerable professional, political, technological, economic and cultural change.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Many health, environmental, and social challenges across the globe – from diabetes to climate change – are regularly discussed in terms of imbalances in biological, ecological, and social systems. Yet, as contributions to this collection demonstrate, while the pressures of modernity have long been held to be pathogenic, strategies for addressing modern excesses and deficiencies of bodies and minds have frequently focused on the agency of the individual, self-knowledge, and individual choices. This volume explores how concepts of ‘balance’ have been central to modern politics, medicine, and society, analysing the diverse ways in which balanced and unbalanced selfhoods have been subject to construction, intervention, and challenge across the long twentieth century. Through original chapters on subjects as varied as obesity control, fatigue and the regulation of work, and the physiology of exploration in extreme conditions, Balancing the self explores how the mechanisms and meanings of balance have been framed historically. Together, contributions examine the positive narratives that have been attached to the ideals and practices of ‘self-help’, the diverse agencies historically involved in cultivating new ‘balanced’ selves, and the extent to which rhetorics of empowerment and responsibility have been used for a variety of purposes, from disciplining bodies to cutting social security. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars such as Dorothy Porter, Alex Mold, Vanessa Heggie, Chris Millard, and Natasha Feiner, Balancing the self generates new insights into emerging fields of health governance, subjectivity, and balance.
This edited volume explores the emergence of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions; its uses in making novel linkages between disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. In short, this volume explores what happened when stress entered the discourse around modernity.
