Inventing human science: eighteenth-century domains

Michael MacDonald's piece on the social history of suicide-represent summaries of an author's previous, more detailed scholarship. A number provide preliminary offerings of new ideas and information, which the reader imagines will go on to appear with elaboration in larger scholarly form. Examples of this last category are Ian Dowbiggin's brief study of theories of paranoia in French mental medicine and Eric Engstrom's discussion of the social and institutional factors informing the formation of Emil Kraepelin's psychiatric thought and practice. My one frustration with the book concerns its skimpy introductory apparatus. A volume running to nearly 700 pages surely requires more than a two-and-a-half page introduction. In particular, I missed a strong editorial statement about the basic epistemology of the book's subject: both historically and conceptually, what is meant by the categories "disorder", "syndrome", "disease", and "illness"? Other primary terms and categories, such as "organic", "functional", "neurosis", and "psychosis", also go unexplicated. Similarly, given its prominence in the organization of the volume, some general words about the interface between the clinical and social in the history of medicine would have been appropriate. Nevertheless, this book retains great value as a work of reference. For non-specialists, it is perhaps the best place to begin to learn about a given topic, a quick and reliable guide into the large literatures on each of these subjects. Like so many of the essay collections and reference works that have poured forth from the Wellcome factory in the past decade, A history of clinical psychiatry was a project eminently worth undertaking.