Book review: A tale of two disorders: syphilis, hysteria and the struggle to treat mental illness

Andy · Aug 23, 2019

How the Brain Lost its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness Allan H. Ropper and Brian Burrell Penguin (2019)

Neurology and psychiatry both struggle to engage with disorders that elude neat classification. Neurologists deal with well-characterized biological conditions such as Huntington’s disease. But they also treat ‘in-between’ disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome (characterized by involuntary vocalizations or movements), and see people with physical symptoms that are ultimately revealed as strictly psychological. Most psychiatrists, for their part, work with the conviction that all mental illness has a biological basis. Yet they insist that the content of mental suffering matters, and that their task is to heal minds, not just fix brains.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02476-w

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Book review: A tale of two disorders: syphilis, hysteria and the struggle to treat mental illness

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Book review: A tale of two disorders: syphilis, hysteria and the struggle to treat mental illness

Andy Committee Member

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