Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 / / Gerald N. Grob.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Grob, Gerald N.,
• MitwirkendeR: Grob, Gerald N.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2019]; ©1983
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Legacy Library ; 5318
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (448 p.)

Gerald N. Grob's Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 has become a classic of American social history. Here the author continues his investigations by a study of the complex interrelationships of patients, psychiatrists, mental hospitals, and government between 1875 and World War II. Challenging the now prevalent notion that mental hospitals in this period functioned as jails, he finds that, despite their shortcomings, they provided care for people unable to survive by themselves. From a rich variety of previously unexploited sources, he shows how professional and political concerns, rather than patient needs, changed American attitudes toward mental hospitals from support to antipathy.Toward the end of the 1800s psychiatrists shifted their attention toward therapy and the mental hygiene movement and away from patient care. Concurrently, the patient population began to include more aged people and people with severe somatic disorders, whose condition recluded their caring for themselves. In probing these changes, this work clarifies a central issue of decent and humane health care.Gerald N. Grob is Professor of History at Rutgers University. Among his works are Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (Free Press), Edward Jarvis and the Medical World of Nineteenth-Century America (Tennessee), and The State and the Mentality III (North Carolina).Originally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- TABLES -- PREFACE -- ABBREVIATIONS -- PROLOGUE -- ONE. The Mental Hospital -- TWO. American Psychiatry: A Specialty Adrift -- THREE. The Transformation of Psychiatry -- FOUR. The Search for Public Policy -- FIVE. The Quest for Psychiatric Authority -- SIX. The Mental Hygiene Movement -- SEVEN. The Invisible Patient -- EIGHT. Dilemmas of Control: Accountability versus Autonomy -- NINE. The Emergence of the Mental Health Professions -- TEN. The Psychiatric Response -- ELEVEN. Mental Hospitals and Psychiatry Between the Wars -- EPILOGUE -- NOTES -- NOTE ON SOURCES -- INDEX