Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, reveals, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth. Here, Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of "shrinks" to its late blooming maturity--beginning after World...

"The acclaimed author of The Unquiet Mind considers the age-old quest for relief from psychic pain and the role of the gifted healer in the journey back to health. "To treat, even to cure, is not always to heal." In this expansive cultural history of the treatment and healing of suffering, Kay Jamison writes about what makes an effective healer, and the role of imagination and memory in the regeneration of the mind. From the trauma of the bloodiest...

Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum.