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

by Jan E. Goldstein

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226301600
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/02/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
Introduction

1. "Profession" in context
  The corporate model
  The statist model 
  The laissez-faire model 
  Redefinition

2. Toward psychiatry
  The bureaucracy: health police of the insane
  General medical theory: medicine as "anthropology"
  Specialization

3. The transformation of charlatanism, or the moral treatment
  Philippe Pinel: a medical career in political context
  Pinel and the "concierges": the origins of the moral treatment
  What was the moral treatment?
  "Scientizing" the treatment
  A therapy for the Revolution
  Healthy sentimentality

4. The politics of patronage
  The Pinel circle
  The Esquirol circle
  The dynamics of recruitment: specialization and the "doctor glut"

5. Monomania
  The initial definition of the disease
  Professional ramifications (I): charting "mental tendencies"
  Professional ramifications (II): the emergence of forensic psychiatry
  A boundary dispute with the legal profession
  The elusive insanity: its partisans and its varieties
  The politicization of the monomania doctrine
  The medical defense of monomania and the self-defense of psychiatric specialization
  The decline of monomania

6. Religious roots and rivals
  A religious mission to the insane
  The moral treatment as religious consolation
  The anticlerical current in early médecine mentale
  The collaborative possibility

7. Choosing philosophical sides
  The philosophical choice
  Médecine mentale and "physiology"
  The inroads of spiritualism
  Practical implications of philosophical positions
  Some comparative remarks

8. The Law of 1838 and the asylum system
  Lunacy legislation and the constitutional monarchy
  The obstacle of interdiction and the theory of isolation
  The government's bill: an exercise in "political medicine"
  The establishment of a nationwide asylum system
  Assessing the clerical "threat"

9. Hysteria, anticlerical politics, and the view beyond the asylum
  The hysteria diagnosis and the epidemiology of hysteria
  The appropriation of the demi-fou
  A profession's progress, 1838-1876
  Shifting political configurations, 1838-1876
  The anticlerical partnership 
 
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliographic note
Afterword
Index