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Here's a pro tip: if you want someone to review your book, be sure to include "short" in the title. Read a short history of a compelling topic in my field? Sign. Me. Up. I didn't, I admit, stop to reflect too closely on what "short" might mean in the context of A Brief History of Personality Disorders. It could mean the book is short, or the history is short, or (stretching a grammatical point) the history of personality disorders is itself, relative to history as a whole, short. Spoiler alert: it's not the first one. The book itself isn't, on the scale of academic-trade writing, particularly short, at 227 pages. What "short" means here is more like synthetic, or sweeping, or broad: this is an overview not just of personality disorders, but personality as a whole, and, indeed, disorders as a (culturally contingent) category. That's a lot to squeeze in; no wonder it isn't actually all that short, and to be honest, I'm glad it's not.
The book is in fact a bit breathless: a race (or at least a jog) through a couple of hundred years of history (and a look back to antiquity, as one does) to discuss not just the history of personality disorders, but indeed the history of both personality and disorders. If that means that the actual disorders get … errr … short shrift, it's worth it: as Horwitz compellingly explains, personality disorders are a particularly complicated category both as an entity, and indeed as individual components. As is true for a lot of mental illness, disease models simply do not fit. It's more acute in this case: personality, Horwitz outlines, is deeply shaped by social, political, and historical conditions. That makes it fair game for a variety of disciplines to study and claim, and at the same time, hard to determine norms. It's also really hard to study in traditional tests: with, say, IQ tests, there is an internal motivation to get it right. That's not that different to personality tests, except that "getting it right" is itself contingent on what the test-taker believes to be the best outcome. It's a motivated approach based on circumstance: if you want a job (or to get out of a job) you'll frame your answers accordingly. And even in cases where the test is untethered to an outcome, the answers reflect what the test-taker believes to be true about themselves rather than what might actually be the case. Personality is hard to measure, and it's hard to determine where a personality stops and a disorder starts. Unlike the classic medical model, which understands
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Critics of diet and exercise cultures often complain that people treat their health practices like religions. They intend this observation as a critique. Comparison to religion in this context implies that devotees demonstrate excessive zeal for their lifestyles, expect too much from mere regimen, and, especially, engage in unwelcome proselytization. In Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating, historian Catherine L. Newell rejects this dismissive attitude and takes the resemblance between diets and religion seriously, exploring where food-focused lifestyles fit into the history of religion in the United States and how they operate as spiritual practices today.
Newell begins by situating the diets she denominates food faiths—veganism, Paleo, and various ancestral diets—within sociological conceptions of religious change in the last half century. According to the framework proposed by Robert Wuthnow and others, American believers moved from faiths focused on "dwelling" (p. 19) in traditions and institutions in the mid-twentieth century to "seeking" (p. 20) new forms of extra-institutional spirituality during the counter-culture years. Now, following the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, many believers simply focus on cultivating a "spiritual practice" (p. 22).1 Food faiths fit into this final stage, Newell argues. Here she proposes a secularization narrative. For as much as we should understand dieting as "a new form of spiritual practice" (p. 24), this practice derives not from belief in deities or scriptures but from belief in science. Dieting is not so much like religion; it has replaced religion, becoming "secular theology for the science-minded" (p. 14).
In the next two chapters—the longest of the book—Newell offers a detailed history of diet-based lifestyles from the health reform movement of Sylvester Graham in the early nineteenth century to the debates between Ancel Keys and John Yudkin over the lipid hypothesis in the late twentieth century. Secularization again provides the framework. While antebellum health reformers urged Americans to adopt abstemious diets as part of the divine plan for material and spiritual flourishing, late twentieth-century Atkins dieters followed the dictates of science in pursuit of bodily health and beauty. The turning point in this transition, Newell argues, came in the early twentieth century with John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg began promoting healthy lifestyles at the Battle Creek Sanitarium as an extension of his Seventh-day Adventist faith, but, wh
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In this brilliant, deeply researched, and beautifully written book, Susan Grant seeks to "show that nurses were crucial symbols of the new Soviet state" (p. 3). The author draws from a variety of sources: archives in Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Sochi, and Tambov) as well as Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She uses a range of Soviet periodicals and newspapers, films and photographs, and other material to produce a compelling and important work.
What is really different about Soviet nurses? The Soviet state prioritized the ideological and political role of nurses alongside their role to care for and administer to the sick. Soviet "health authorities worried about the social and class background" of medical workers (p. 77) and stressed the importance of "training ideologically reliable workers" (p. 100). The problems in health care reflected the problems of Soviet society generally, such as economic realities of shortage and informality (bribes, tips, etc.).
One of the great strengths of the book is that it provides a history of the Soviet Union through the lens of health care. In the years that coincided with Stalinist repression and hunt for enemies, medical workers like other ordinary citizens were denounced, investigated, arrested, and even executed. During the war, medical workers faced deteriorating conditions. "By late 1941 and 1942, measles, typhus, and other diseases spread eastward along evacuation routes. … By 1943 and 1944, medical workers had to cope with vast numbers suffering from starvation and tuberculosis" (p. 145). Soviet authorities focused nurse training on the country's unique health care problems, such as high levels of infant mortality and tuberculosis. In the Soviet Union because there was a spectrum of middle- and junior-level medical workers that were typically lumped together, "nurses, feldshers, and doctors worked together, and their roles often overlapped" (p. 74).
Although the Soviet context was unique in many ways, in other ways it was not. One common feature of Soviet nursing was that women dominated the nursing profession. The state's gendered discourse stressed the need for "care" and "compassion" and for medical workers to have "maternal" sensibilities, while male doctors often looked down upon nurses and diminished their value. The Soviet state paid them less too: "Efforts to place women on a par with men did not always play out in practice. Conservatism was still entrenched at state and societal levels" (p. 97).
Moreover, in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere, rural areas were underserved because few medical
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Tuviya Cohen was arguably the most famous Jewish physician of the early modern period. Born in Metz, France, in 1652, Cohen was the son of Moses Cohen Narol, a Polish émigré who fled the 1648–49 Khmelnytsky massacres and served for a time as the chief rabbi of Metz. After spending his formative years in Poland, Tuviya studied in the university of Frankfurt an der Oder and later in Padua, where he eventually earned his medical degree alongside other Jewish students.
Much of what we know of Tuviya's life is drawn from his magnum opus, Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice, 1708), a Hebrew encyclopedia of natural sciences, theology, pharmacology, and medicine. It is this work that constitutes the seed text for the articles collected in Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine and Science. Regrettably little information about Tuviya's life trajectory exists outside this text, aside from a few scant letters published by the late nineteenth-century scholar David Kaufmann. This makes the text of Ma'ase Tuviya all the more enticing as a primary source, as much for its insights about early modern Jewish engagement with science and medicine as for the biographical information about its author.
Edited by Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kottek, and Helena Paavilainen, with a foreword by Fred Rosner, this volume consists of eight articles concerning different aspects of Tuviya Cohen's Ma'ase Tuviya, in addition to an appendix containing translated excerpts of Cohen's text. Some components of these pieces were previously published in a special issue of Korot: The Israeli Journal of the History of Medicine and Science, of which Kottek and Collins have both served as editors. On top of this, one article by Samuel Kottek centers on the German-Jewish physician Fritz Kahn. Kottek notes that the editors deemed it worthy of inclusion in the book "in view of, and in comparison to, Tuviya's illustration of the human body delineated as a house," a curious claim given that it is difficult to discern a tangible connection between Kahn's illustrations and Tuviya's earlier work.
The volume's first article, "Tuviya Cohen and His Medical Studies," by Collins, presents an overview of Tuviya's medical education and his interaction with other Jewish students at the University of Padua. This essay is followed by a piece by Kottek, which attempts to place Tuviya Cohen's work in context primarily by identifying his work's citations. The article makes several observations about what the text
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| Forum | |
| Introduction: Revisiting the History of Abortion in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision / 1 | |
| Kelly O'Donnell and Naomi Rogers | |
| From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime / 11 | |
| Leslie J. Reagan | |
| Writing the History of Legal Abortion / 22 | |
| Johanna Schoen | |
| A View from Northern Mexico: Abortions before Roe v. Wade / 30 | |
| Lina-Maria Murillo | |
| Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country / 39 | |
| Brianna Theobald | |
| "It Gives the Mother the Best Chance for Her Life": U.S. Catholic Health Care and the Treatment of Ectopic Pregnancy / 48 | |
| Jessica Martucci | |
| Tech-ing the Trade: Notes on Reformulating Abortion and Its History / 57 | |
| Kelly O'Donnell | |
| Articles | |
| Once Bitten: Mosquito-Borne Malariotherapy and the Emergence of Ecological Malariology Within and Beyond Imperial Britain / 67 | |
| Tom Quick | |
| The Origins of Camphill and the Legacy of the Asylum in Disability History / 100 | |
| Katherine Sorrels | |
| "Heroin Mothers," "Methadone Babies," and the Medical Controversy over Methadone Maintenance in the Early 1970s / 127 | |
| Ulrich Koch | |
| In Conversation | |
| Reflecting on the Work and Career of Charles Rosenberg: Allan Brandt Interviews Charles Rosenberg / 181 | |
| Articles | |
| The Many Colors of Excrement: Galen and the History of Chinese Phlegm / 197 | |
| Natalie Köhle | |
| "When I Think of It I Awfully Dread It": Conceptualizing Childbirth Pain in Early America / 227 | |
| Nora Doyle | |
| Vaccination, Dispossession, and the Indigenous Interior / 255 | |
| Seth Archer | |
| Prenatal Care in the Rural United States, 1912–1929 / 294 | |
| Nicole Holding | |
| The History of Psychiatric Epidemiology in Finland: From National Needs to International Arenas, 1900s–1990s / 321 | |
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