Mark Micale
Department of History
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL (UK)

HISTORY 955A (taught at Yale University)

This is a graduate course in the social, intellectual, cultural, and institutional history of psychiatry in Europe, Britain, and North America from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Topics of discussion include: the origins of modern psychiatric humanitarianism; the nature of the "moral treatment"; psychiatric professionalization; the "rise of the asylum"; mental medicine and degenerationist theory; mental medicine and degenerationist theory; the "birth of the neuroses"; psychiatry and the beginnings of medical sexology; the rise of legal psychiatry; psychiatry and gender; the emergence of psychoanalysis; and psychiatry and war. Seminar readings consist of a combination of primary texts by major nineteenth-century medical authors and selections from the recent (and rapidly growing) secondary literature on the history of psychological medicine.

The course may be taken either as a reading or a research seminar. Requirements include attendance and participation in weekly discussions, an informal in-class report of 15-20 minutes on a relevant secondary source of your choice, and a written essay due at the end of the semester. Students taking the course as a reading seminar should a paper of 10-15 pages on a single primary text or a historiographical issue. For research credit, a somewhat more substantial essay, about 25-30 pages in length and combining original and secondary sources, is appropriate.

1) September 7 Preliminaries: Psychiatric History as a Scholarly Field Today

Introduction to The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, volume I, W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds. (1985), 1-24.

Roy Porter and Mark S. Micale, "Reflections on Psychiatry and Its Histories," in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, Micale and Porter, eds. (forthcoming), 3-36.

2) September 14 Founding Fathers/"Inaugural Texts"

Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity (1801; translation 1806), sections 2, 5, and 6.

3) September 21 The "Moral Treatment" of the Early Nineteenth Century--The Historiographical Debate

Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America: A History of Their Care and Treatment from Colonial Times (1937), chapter 5.

Michael Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), chapters 8 and 9.

Henri Baruk, "L'Oeuvre de Pinel et Esquirol devant l'anti-psychiatrie," Bulletin de l'Academie nationale de medecine, 155 (1971), 205-215.

Eric Carlson and N. Pain, "The Psychotherapy that was Moral Treatment," American Journal of Psychiatry, 9 (1970), 50-54.

Robert Castel, "Moral Treatment: Mental Therapy and Social Control in the Nineteenth Century" (1971) in Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, S. Cohen and A. Scull, eds. (1981), 248-266.

Constance M. Govern, "The Myths of Social Control and Custodial Oppression: Patterns of Psychiatric Medicine in Late Nineteenth-Century Institutions," Journal of Social History (Fall, 1986), 3-23.

Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (1987), chapter 3.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Arthur Still and Irving Velody, eds. Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault's Histoire de la folie (1992).

Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1980 (1980).

4) September 28 Monomania--A Diagnosis and Its Meanings

J.-E.-D. Esquirol, "Monomania" (1819) in Dictionnaire des sciences medicales, 34 (1819), 114-126.

-----Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (1838), 319-376.

Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify, chapter 5.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Goldstein, Console and Classify, complete.

Marcel Gauchet and Galdys Swain, La pratique de l'esprit humain: l'institution asilaire de la revolution democratique (1980).

5) October 5 Psychiatry and Its Institutional Settings

Anne Digby, Madness, Morality, and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat, 1796-1914 (1985).

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-keeping, 1840-1883 (1984).

Ellen Dwyer, Homes for the Mad: Life in Two Nineteenth-century Asylums (1987).

Colin Jones, "The Treatment of the Insane in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Montpellier," Medical History, 24 (1980), 371-390.

John Walton, "The Treatment of Pauper Lunatics in Victorian England: The Case of Lancaster Asylum, 1816-1870" in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, Andrew Scull, ed. (1981), 166-197.

William Parry-Jones, "The Model of Geel Lunatic Colony and Its Influence on the Nineteenth-Century Asylum System in Britain" in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, 201-217.

Laurence J. Ray, "Models of Madness in Victorian Asylum Practice," Archives europeenes de sociologie, 22 (1981), 229-264.

Mark S. Micale, "The Salpetriere in the Age of Charcot: An Institutional Perspective on Medical History in the Late Nineteenth Century," Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 703-731.

6) October 12 Mental Medicine and the Theory of Degeneration

B.A. Morel, Traite des degenerescences de l'espece humaine (1857), selections.

Ian Dowbiggin, "Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Mental Medicine, 1840-1890: Psychiatric Theory as Ideological Adaptation" in Anatomy of Madness, I (1985), 188-232.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (1984).

J.E. Chamberlain and S.L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (1985).

Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (1989).

7) October 19 Neurasthenia--The Medicalization of Everyday Emotional Life

George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (1880), selections.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Francis L. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870-1910 (1987).

Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (1991).

Charles Rosenberg, "The Place of George M. Beard in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry,"Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 36 (1962), 245-259.

Barbara Sicherman, "The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 32 (1977), 33-54.

Anson Rabinbach, "The Body without Fatigue: A Nineteenth-century Utopia" in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George Mosse, S. Drescher, ed., (1982), 46-62.

8) October 26 Psychiatry and the Emergence of Medical Sexology

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; translation 1900), chapters 1 and 4.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex (1976).

Georges Lanteri-Laura, Lecture d'un perversion: histoire de leur appropriation medicale (1979).

Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (1987).

9) November 2 The Origins of Legal Psychiatry in the Late Nineteenth Century

Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trail of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the American Gilded Age (1968).

Report and Supplementary Readings:

Roger Smith, Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (1981).

Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the "Fin-de-Siecle" (1989).

10) November 9 Psychiatry and the Question of Gender

Ann Douglas Wood, "The 'Fashionable Diseases': Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1973), 25-52.

Regina Markell Morantz, "The Perils of Feminist History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1973), 649-660.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America" (1972), reprinted in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985), 197-216.

Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985), Introduction and chapter 6.

Mark S. Micale, "Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Science, and Medical Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-century France," Medical History, 34 (1990), 363-411.

----"Hysteria Male/Hysteria Female: Reflections on Comparative Gender Construction in Nineteenth-century Medicine" in Sense and Sensibility: Essays on Gender and Scientific Enquiry in Britain, 1780-1945, Marina Benjamin, ed. (1991), chapter 7.

Janet Oppenheim, "Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (1991), chapters 5 and 6.

Nancy Tomes, "Feminist Histories of Psychiatry," in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, Micale and Porter, eds. (forthcoming), chapter 19.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (1973).

Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women (1975).

Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985).

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (1988).

11) November 16 The Emergence of Twentieth-century Psychodynamic Psychiatry

Josef Breuer, "Case Histories: Fräulein Anna O." in Studies on Hysteria (1895), 21-27.

The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, J. M. Masson, ed., (1985), selections.

Report and Supplementary Reading:

Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The Origins and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970), selections.

Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), selections.

Frank J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979), selections.

12) November 30 Psychiatry and the First World War

Pat Barker, Regeneration: A Novel (1991).

Reports and Supplementary Reading:

Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (1979).

Elaine Showalter, "Male Hysteria: W. H. R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock," in Showalter, The Female Malady, chapter 7.

13) December 7 and 14: Reading and writing for essays: Individual meetings

Readings for the course will be located each week in the Andrews Society Reading Room in Sterling Memorial Library, room 214, shelf 211. Copies of all assigned primary texts (Pinel, Esquirol, Morel, Krafft-Ebing) in their original language may be found at the Historical Library of the Yale Medical School at 333 Cedar Street. (The medical history collection at Yale is superb and well worth a visit.) More conveniently, bound photocopies of these primary texts, in English-language translations, will be available at Minitprint Copy on Broadway Avenue.

Multiple copies of the secondary sources for each week, both articles and books, will be placed on the reading shelf in SML. Also, I have ordered at the Yale Co-op several copies of Charles Rosenberg's book for week 9 and Pat Barker's novel for week 12; both texts are affordable paperbacks that the entire class will be reading. You may wish to order and purchase for yourself other titles on the syllabus from a local bookstore.

If the general subject of psychiatric history is new to you, you may also want to read a general intellectual history of the subject. Erwin Ackerknecht's A Short History of Psychiatry (1959) is an excellent, compact study. A second Whiggish, but factually fuller survey can be found in Gregory Zilboorg's A History of Medical Psychology, second edition (1967). I have put copies of Ackerknecht's and Zilboorg's books on the shelf as well as copies of a contemporary psychiatric dictionary and the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.