Robert Koch, a life in medicine and bacteriology

Abstract

Reviewsrecurring "innovations" in institutional reform, T. G. Davies on Ernest Jones (not quite the demolition job that the Introduction implies), and Virginia Berridge on the vicissitudes of the disease model of addiction.James Birley's 1974 lecture, the first in the book, compares the work of psychiatrists and painters; Berrios's entire essay (1988), the last, can be read as an amplification of Birley's formulation that it all comes down to the business of "transforming the data . .by a process of symbolic representation".What causes "madness"?-thegoverning elite's nervousness about popular religious radicalism, or rotting teeth?For that matter, whence comes the history of psychiatry?Apparently, out of the divergence of consensus: but a divergence along class lines, between the professions of medicine and history, or simply over time?This book provides ammunition for adherents of all sorts of explanations.