Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry. 1535-1860

Three hundred years ofpsychiatry is without doubt one of the best books ever produced on the history of psychiatry.Most collections of extracts are at most useful for casual browsing and conveying a flavour of original sources."Hunter and Macalpine", as it tends to be called, performs those functions, but it does much more.It was so generously conceived and intelligently executed that it is simultaneously a book of readings and a genuine research tool.The focus is Britain, and the documents were selected from a rich variety of sources: extracts from standard and obscure medical and psychiatric writers like Burton, Willis, Battie, and Conolly lie side by side with selections from diaries, letters, sermons, Acts of Parliament, and newspaper advertisements.Each of the 250 separate entries -arranged chronologically -is pre- faced with a biographical or historical exegesis, indicating its significance and placing it in its social context.The extracts were selected with care, and their historical placements were impeccably researched and presented.The result was not simply to provide materials for a history of psychiatry in Britain from 1535 to 1860, but a brilliant version of that history.