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Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870-1910
出版University of Illinois Press, 1987
主題Medical / GeneralMedical / NeurologyPsychology / GeneralPsychology / NeuropsychologyPsychology / Psychopathology / General
ISBN02520140659780252014062
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=QMic9suFj30C&hl=&source=gbs_api
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註釋Neurasthenia is the blanket term used to describe nearly every nonspecific emotional disorder short of madness in pre-Freudian America. In fact, it was turn-of-the-century America's primary mental disorder -- so prevalent that the nineteenth century has been dubbed "the nervous century." Once viewed as a single disease by nineteenth-century physicians, the syndrome is now subdivided into more distinct diagnostic categories. Its victims suffered from extreme fatigue, insomnia, depression, headache, dyspepsia, and other vague symptoms. In this first in-depth study of the disease, F. G. Gosling offers surprising results of a comprehensive research project. through his eye-opening analysis of 332 articles written on neurasthenia by 262 physicians during the forty-year-period just prior to the acceptance of Freud's views in the United States, Gosling reveals that all types of physicians in Victorian America practiced an early form of psychotherapy, diagnosing and treating many disorders now regarded as the province of psychiatrists. Extracting from patient records, he demonstrates that stress disorders were experienced by a broad spectrum of late nineteenth-century Americans, not just the upper-middle-class clientele of elite urban neurologists. Biased by the nineteenth-century assumptions that the mind and body were inseparable, physicians believed that neurasthenia was a somatic disorder with a variety of physical and mental manifestations. Gosling traces the evolution of etiological concepts of neurasthenia from 1870 to 1910, when the medical community recognized that neurasthenia was basically a disorder of the mind. According to Gosling, by studying psychiatry's progression during the past century, we can work toward integrative model that synthesizes the biological, social, and psychological factors that influence the mind. This book will be of interest to practicing health professionals and medical historians as well as historians concerned with class and gender issues.