History of Mental Illness

3 credits · Graduate

What is madness? Historical analysis offers a variety of answers to this question. This course will provide students with a broad introduction to the modern history of mental illness, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will cover a diverse set of issues, including the disciplinary formation of psychiatry and neurology, new medical understandings of pathology, and the political assumptions and ramifications of defining and redefining madness in the North Atlantic and abroad.