Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century

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University of Chicago Press, 2001 - Medical - 432 pages
Since its publication in 1989, Console and Classify has become a classic work in the history of science and in French intellectual history. Now with a new afterword, this much-cited and much-discussed book gives readers the chance to revisit the rise of psychiatry in nineteenth-century France, the shape it took and why, and its importance both then and in contemporary society.

"Goldstein has raised our understanding of the politics of psychiatric professionalization on to a new plane."—Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[A]n historiographical tour de force, quite simply the most insightful work on the subject in English or any other language. . . . [A] work of distinctive originality. . . . It is written with lucidity and elegance, even a certain confident scholarly panache, that make it a pleasure to read."—Toby Gelfand, Social History

"Exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and persuasively argued, Console and Classify is an excellent example of the . . . sociologically informed intellectual history, stimulated by Kuhn and Foucault."—Robert Alun Jones, American Journal of Sociology
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Profession in context
8
The corporate model
15
The statist model
20
The laissezfaire model
28
Redefinition
35
Toward psychiatry
41
medicine as anthropology
49
Religious roots and rivals
197
The moral treatment as religious consolation
200
The anticlerical current in early medecine mentale
210
The collaborative possibility
225
Choosing philosophical sides
240
The philosophical choice
242
Medecine mentale and physiology
245
The inroads of spiritualism
257

Specialization
55
The transformation of charlatanism or the moral treatment
64
a medical career in political context
67
the origins of the moral treatment
72
What was the moral treatment?
80
Scientizing the treatment
89
A therapy for the Revolution
105
Healthy sentimentality
117
The politics of patronage
120
The Pinel circle
122
The Esquirol circle
128
specialization and the doctor glut
147
Monomania
152
The initial definition of the disease
155
charting mental tendencies
158
the emergence of forensic psychiatry
162
A boundary dispute with the legal profession
166
its partisans and its varieties
169
The politicization of the monomania doctrine
179
The medical defense of monomania and the selfdefense of psychiatric specialization
184
The decline of monomania
189
Practical implications of philosophical positions
263
Some comparative remarks
273
The Law of 1838 and the asylum system
276
Lunacy legislation and the constitutional monarchy
277
The obstacle of interdiction and the theory of isolation
285
an exercise in political medicine
292
The establishment of a nationwide asylum system
297
Assessing the clerical threat
307
Hysteria anticlerical politics and the view beyond the asylum
322
The hysteria diagnosis and the epidemiology of hysteria
323
The appropriation of the demifou
331
A professions progress 18381876
339
Shifting political configurations 18381876
351
The anticlerical partnership
361
Conclusion
378
Appendix
385
Bibliographic note
391
Afterword
398
Index
416
Copyright

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Page 395 - Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), esp. p. 71. For Eliot's own definition of her aims, see Adam Bede, Bk. II, ch. 17; also The Natural History of German Life' and 'John Ruskin's Modem Painters, Vol.

About the author (2001)

Jan Goldstein is a professor of modern European history and a member of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her other books include Foucault and the Writing of History and two volumes of the Chicago Readings in Western Civilization.

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