Our understanding of the history of psychiatry has been warped by the way history is remembered – collectively and personally; this is the point of departure from which Wynter, Wallis and Ellis have embarked upon this splendid essay anthology. The introduction provokes something of a liminal space by describing psychiatry as a specialty that is ever existing between ‘the terrible past and the ideal future’. They argue that barbarity has become a cultural trope for psychiatry, especially when historical treatments are viewed through modern framing without the scaffolding of contemporaneous societal values. Progress seems to always be in response to wanting to heal this iniquity and provide a change in direction. The authors endeavour to show us that the actuality of psychiatry may exist somewhere between these two opposing poles, and furthermore it is interested in the idea that modern mental health services have arisen from within this in-between space.

The essays loosely stick to a theme of memory and remembrance, and are arranged within five sections: governance; practitioners; case books; oral histories; and personal recollections. The various essays look at different aspects of psychiatry through different eras and across the globe, with very distinct voices and forms, but this thematic arrangement provides a sense of cohesion. However, there is no onus on the reader to read the whole collection all at once, with most of the pieces having enough strength to be considered in their own right.

We see Britain's colonial footprint in the particularly provocative ‘Madness, memory and delusion in late nineteenth-century Barbados’, whereby Leonard Smith skilfully introduces readers to the cultural matrix of colonial Barbados, where many people were living in destitution, and then goes on to consider a series of nineteenth-century lunatic asylum case records held in the Barbados National Archive. A re-examination of these material impressions of the past acknowledges the colonial gaze through which patients were described, but also provides a new way of seeing patients and their problems, beyond the hermeneutic trouble entailed by the passage of time.

A chapter about Bombay's lunatic asylums around the turn of the twentieth century readily relates to this one, but other works describing topics as far reaching as the remodelling of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and the nostalgia experienced by staff in the wake of an American psychiatric hospital ensure a significant breadth of content. The book ends with a devastatingly honest reflective essay by Allan Beveridge that focuses sharply upon his experience of psychiatric training in Edinburgh in the 1980s. He shares his personal sense of excitement upon embarking upon his career that gives way to unease as he faces the reality of clinical practice, and the discombobulating effect of competing explanations and opposing views that continue to persist, to a greater or lesser extent, to this day.

The book grasps onto the Derridean idea that there is an ever-transforming inheritance of the past in light of changing contexts of the future, and that the key to history lies in how it is remembered. Through an exploration of remembrance, this work generates novel insights, which allow us to recast how we understand previous insights into psychiatry's past. This thought-provoking essay collection will generate enthusiasm for new ways of considering the past and reframing the present through troubling our interpretation of what has been written before. It is certainly worth reading to generate reflections on what the legacy of our own work may be.