Styles of scientific thought: the German genetics community, 1900–1933

difficult task, or was it more an accident of co-terminosity? The anti-psychiatrists who adopted his themes, the "Great Confinement" and so forth, happened to be in the ascendant at the time (the early 1960s) and embraced his anti-institutional analysis with perfervid zeal despite the confusions engendered in both directions. There seems to have been little acknowledgement either that asylumdom was, in itself, the necessary precursor to current critiques, given that the putting of mad people into the "bricks and mortar" solution was an eventuality that was always going to be tried out by someone, at some time, once economically and architecturally possible. There is also no contribution here from a professional psychiatrist, although Colin Gordon decides that a suggestion from Peter Barham (a psychologist) is "typical evidence" of the psychiatric profession's "intellectual insecurity and its propensity to moral blackmail". This may be true, but to equate psychiatrists with psychologists, particularly in the field of anti-psychiatric social history, is, to say the least, thoughtless. This is a kind of "easy wandering lie", that perhaps points to the existence of someone whose mind might "easily be a wandering one". Perhaps psychiatrists, rather than historians or sociologists or related academics, will profit most from this oddly stimulating collection. It provides a useful introduction, warts and all, to modern historiography and the forms of socio-historical analysis now enriching their past. It reveals the danger of attempting to translate ideas (let alone "discourses") across time, culture, and language. Thus, should we translate the French "deraison" as "unreason"? What about "dysreason", since something untried seems in order? Is there any satisfactory word at all? Should we go on arguing about Michel Foucault, or should he be decently interred with the historical plate and armour of his time? Is clarity of expression honourable, or is that just the impossible objective of the dull old English empiric? Some will welcome the spectre of "endless rewriting" generated by such questions. Others will wish to close the book, glad to have done the reading, but glad to be back in open country, clear of the foliage. This book is directed at two disparate audiences: historians of genetics, who will be interested in the detailed information it provides on the German genetics community, and sociologists of science, who will be interested in its wider message. I suspect that it will establish itself as a reference text for both constituencies and I …