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Great Books in Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Edward Hare*
Affiliation:
The Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 3BX

Extract

Few people (and the present writer is not one of them) will know enough about psychiatric books to be able to declare which are the greatest. My own list is a sample biased by chance, ignorance and prejudice. But within these limitations I have worked to a plan and chosen those books which seem to me to represent or reflect important stages in the historical development of psychiatry.

Type
Reading About …
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1981 

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References

An historical study of books implies a study of their authors and of the climate of opinion in which they lived and worked. The student will therefore be indebted to historians and translators.Google Scholar
Among history books, I have been particularly helped by E. Ackerknecht's A Short History of Psychiatry (translated from the German by S. Wolff. London: Hafner, 1959), R. Hunter and I. Macalpine's Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (London: O.U.P. 1963), Denis Leigh's The Historical Development of British Psychiatry (Oxford: Pergamon, 1961), René Semelaigne's Les Grands Aliénistes Francois (Paris, 1894) and D. H. Tuke's Chapters on the History of the Insane in the British Isles (London, 1882).Google Scholar
Battle's Treatise on Madness and Monro's Remarks on Dr Battie's Treatise have been reprinted, with an introduction and annotations by Hunter and Macalpine (London: Dawsons, 1962). Pinel's Traité of 1801 was translated into English by D. D. Davies as A Treatise on Insanity in 1806, and has been re-issued with an introduction by P. F. Cranefield (New York: Hafner, 1962). Esquirol's Des Maladies Mentales was translated by E. K. Hunt in 1845 as Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, and has been re-issued with an introduction and annotations by R. de Saussure (London: Hafner, 1965). I have found no translation of Bayle's and Calmeil's books of 1826, but the relevant part of Bayle's thesis of 1822, on which rests his claim to have ‘discovered’ dementia paralytica, has been translated by M. Moore and H. C. Solomon in their paper, ‘Contributions of Haslam, Bayle, Esmach and Jessen to the history of neurosyphilis’ (Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1934, 32, 804–39).Google Scholar
The second edition (1865) of Griesinger's textbook was translated by C. R. Robertson and J. Rutherford as Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (London: New Sydenham Society, 1867). Relevant portions of the 8th edition of Kraepelin's Psychiatrie (1913) were translated by R. M. Barclay as Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia (1919) and Manic-depressive Insanity and Paranoia (1921, Edinburgh: Livingstone). Bleuler's Dementia Praecox (1911) was translated as Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias by J. Zinkin (New York: International Universities Press, 1950). The 4th edition of Freud's Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben was translated as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by A. A. Brill (1914, Pelican Books, 1938); a later enlarged edition has been translated under the same title by A. Tyson (London: Benn, 1960). A collection of Jung's writings was translated by C. F. Baynes as Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Kegan Paul, 1933).Google Scholar
Pfungst's, O. study of the calculating horse (including additional studies with human subjects) was translated by C. Rahn as Clever Hans: the Horse of Mr von Osten and edited by R. Rosenthal (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1965). Other references from the text are: Rothman, D. J., The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Holland, H., ‘On the pellagra, a disease prevailing in Lombardy’, Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, 1817, 8, 317–48; Terris, M., Goldberger on Pellagra (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964).Google Scholar
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