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A very British kind of social psychiatry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2018
Extract
Social psychiatry, as represented in the work of Michael Shepherd, his pupils, and his colleagues at the Maudsley, all intellectual progeny of Sir Aubrey Lewis, is a very British kind of science. Lest this arouse your ire, implying an insult hurled at his betters in the mother country by a colonial parvenu, I hasten to add that “very British” refers to the best in your long and admirable scientific tradition in medicine: an unswerving commitment to empiricism, one which rarely moves much beyond its database; sober understatement, which makes no claim of possessing an exclusive path to salvation; sound methodology; and epistemological caution. It is aptly described by the adjective Apollonian, defined in my New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (NSOED) as “serene, rational, self-disciplined”.
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- Review Articles Michael Shepherd Memorial Symposium
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- Copyright © 1997 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
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