How the Brain Lost Its Mind
Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness
(Sprache: Englisch)
A noted neurologist challenges widespread misunderstandings about brain disease and mental illness.
Why do we think of mental illness as a brain disease? Is there a difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? How the Brain Lost Its Mind,...
Why do we think of mental illness as a brain disease? Is there a difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? How the Brain Lost Its Mind,...
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A noted neurologist challenges widespread misunderstandings about brain disease and mental illness.Why do we think of mental illness as a brain disease? Is there a difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? How the Brain Lost Its Mind, written by a prominent neurologist and a student of medical history, traces the origins of our ideas about insanity and the collision course that simply reduces the mind to the connections between nerve cells. Starting with syphilis of the brain, the disease that made insanity a medical problem and started the field of psychiatry, the authors study a host of famous and infamous characters--among them van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant, and Al Capone.
How the Brain Lost Its Mind explains how we have twisted ourselves into the medicalization of every minor mood and thought, each with a pill to cure the psychopathology of ordinary daily life. How are we to understand serious disorders such as schizophrenia and Tourette's syndrome, in which the brain under the microscope is entirely normal? By delving into an overlooked history, this book shows how neuroscience and brain scans alone cannot account for a robust mental life, or a deeply disturbed one.
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Chapter 1A Clinical Lesson
On a warm Paris afternoon in late spring, throngs of weary tourists swarm the narrow streets off the Boulevard Saint-Michel in search of a place to unwind after a day spent in the grueling pursuit of checklist tourism. Led around by docents and modern-day Baedekers, most of these vacationers have dashed through a handful of the city's five-star attractions, waved selfie sticks while plugged into audio tours, and can now be seen flowing into the Place Saint-Michel in a movable feast fanning out across the sidewalks and down the clogged alleyways feeding into the Rue de la Huchette.
Just around the corner from this bustling warren of conviviality, one of the most historically significant artworks in the city goes unnoticed, unvisited, and unappreciated. Sheltered in a vestibule of a stately neoclassical building, it presides over an oasis of solitude and calm. Because none of the guidebooks mention it, very few people are even aware it exists. It is a large painting, and over the century and a quarter since it was painted, it has lost its notoriety but not its significance. To understand this one painting is to understand everything that went wrong in the modern concept of mind and brain. It portrays nothing less than the original sin of neurology and psychiatry, one from which we are still trying to recover.
The colonnaded building housing the painting is perched on the Rue de l'ecole-de-Medecine, a two-minute walk from the bustle of the Place Saint-Michel. It is the home of Paris Descartes University, a satellite of the Sorbonne. Among other things it contains a museum of medical history: a cabinet of gruesome curiosities including an amputation kit used at the Battle of Waterloo, crude-looking instruments once used to remove bladder stones, and boxes of glass eyes. Admission costs three euros, but the painting can be viewed for free. At nine and a half by fourteen feet, it is too big for the museum's limited
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wall space and has been accommodated just outside of the main gallery, as if in an afterthought, in a skylighted foyer where, on a sunny day, the glare makes it difficult to take in as a whole. As a further indignity, it is unframed and almost casually hung, a sad fate for a work once hailed as "the success of the Salon of 1887."
The painting is by Andre Brouillet, a journeyman artist who studied with the great Jean-Leon Gerome, had a moment of passing fame, and then slid back into obscurity. He titled the work Une Leon Clinique a la Salpetriere (A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere Hospital), and at the Salon des Beaux Arts of 1887, an annual showcase of established and aspiring academically trained artists, it stood out by virtue of its striking subject. Rather than drawing upon the distant past, Brouillet chose to depict a contemporary event, one very much of the moment. The setting is a window-lit room in a hospital. A medical demonstration is in progress before a male audience. At first glance, it appears to be a group portrait of thirty finely rendered individuals. The center of attention is a young woman in a state of semiconsciousness and semi-undress. The scene is highly sexualized and frankly voyeuristic, hardly unusual in the world of academic painting. Two of its more obvious points of reference include a scandalous canvas by Gerome entitled The Slave Market in Rome, featuring a nude young woman standing on an auction block as buyers frantically make their bids. The other, a more subdued work, depicts Philippe Pinel, the aforementioned pioneer in the humane treatment of the insane, as he orders the unshackling of the madwomen at an asylum. Stripped of all context, the subjects of these works are young, vulnerable, exposed, unseeing or semiconscious women under the complete control and watchful eyes of men. In each case the historical moment trumps the sensational content, allowing the paintings to be peddled as art rather than as pornography.
The painting is by Andre Brouillet, a journeyman artist who studied with the great Jean-Leon Gerome, had a moment of passing fame, and then slid back into obscurity. He titled the work Une Leon Clinique a la Salpetriere (A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere Hospital), and at the Salon des Beaux Arts of 1887, an annual showcase of established and aspiring academically trained artists, it stood out by virtue of its striking subject. Rather than drawing upon the distant past, Brouillet chose to depict a contemporary event, one very much of the moment. The setting is a window-lit room in a hospital. A medical demonstration is in progress before a male audience. At first glance, it appears to be a group portrait of thirty finely rendered individuals. The center of attention is a young woman in a state of semiconsciousness and semi-undress. The scene is highly sexualized and frankly voyeuristic, hardly unusual in the world of academic painting. Two of its more obvious points of reference include a scandalous canvas by Gerome entitled The Slave Market in Rome, featuring a nude young woman standing on an auction block as buyers frantically make their bids. The other, a more subdued work, depicts Philippe Pinel, the aforementioned pioneer in the humane treatment of the insane, as he orders the unshackling of the madwomen at an asylum. Stripped of all context, the subjects of these works are young, vulnerable, exposed, unseeing or semiconscious women under the complete control and watchful eyes of men. In each case the historical moment trumps the sensational content, allowing the paintings to be peddled as art rather than as pornography.
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Autoren-Porträt von Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell
Allan H. Ropper, M.D., is professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician of the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is also a deputy editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, the Royal College of Physicians, and the American College of Physicians. Dr. Ropper is an author of the most widely consulted textbook of neurology, Principles of Neurology, currently in its eleventh edition, and coauthor with Brian David Burrell of Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole.Brian David Burrell is a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A teacher and writer, he is the author of several books, including Postcards from the Brain Museum, The Words We Live By, and, jointly with Dr. Allan H. Ropper, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. He is an authority on brain collections worldwide, and has discussed his work on NBC's Today, C-SPAN's Booknotes, and NPR's Morning Edition.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autoren: Allan H. Ropper , Brian Burrell
- 2021, 256 Seiten, Maße: 13,9 x 20,9 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Avery
- ISBN-10: 0735214565
- ISBN-13: 9780735214569
- Erscheinungsdatum: 09.08.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
This aptly titled book picks up where Oliver Sacks left off in examining the behavioral characteristics of neurobehavioral syndromes in an effort to span the gap that has historically separated the twin disciplines of the brain, neurology, and psychiatry. In contrasting the organic (general paresis of the insane) with the ethereal (hysteria), this neuropsychiatric treatise brings the two divergent disciplines closer together without committing to their ultimate unification. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons; Past President of the American Psychiatric Association; author of Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry"Occasionally, a treatise arrives that challenges conventional reductionist notions that brain and mind can be unified through the neuroscience of the brain. Current brain analysis via brain scans, neural networks, genomic analysis, and psychopharmacology has not seduced Ropper and Burrell, who take the contrarian position that there is a subjective mental life that organizes itself. In an unusually readable and surprisingly lyrical account of syphilis, a surrogate for mental disorders caused by brain destruction, and hysteria, a stand-in for psychiatric disorders, they create a fascinating tension between neurology and psychiatry and offer thoughts on unifying the two fields of clinical medicine. Their original interpretations of Conrad s Heart of Darkness and Thomas Mann s Dr. Faustus alone makes the book worth reading as literary criticism." Joseph B. Martin, MD, PhD, Dean Emeritus, Harvard Medical School
A sweeping narrative of how the concept of mental illness evolved in the context of culture, history, and science. How the Brain Lost its Mind is written with wit and wisdom, and filled with vividly depicted colorful characters from Freud to Maupassant to the Marquis de Sade, from the physicians of nineteenth
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century Europe to the public health commissioners of 1930s New York. Ropper and Burrell trace the riveting history of the science of the mind and brain, revealing how and why neurology and psychiatry split, and how the future of medicine depends on their reunification. Aaron Berkowitz, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; author of Clinical Neurology and Neuroanatomy and The Improvising Mind
I have listened to, watched, and read Allan Ropper on subjects related to the brain for thirty years. He's still my teacher, but I've never seen him teach like this. Along with his friend and gifted co-author, Ropper takes us on a romp through centuries of cultural and scientific history. There's a kicker: can that history clarify and crystallize through the lens of just one nasty disease? Yes. Read how in this page-turningly accessible and brilliant book. Edison K. Miyawaki, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; author of The Frontal Brain and Language
A thrilling journey from the dramatic common origins of neurology and psychiatry, through their historical divergence, to their current realignment. The medical, scientific and social histories of two fascinating conditions are brilliantly interwoven and contrasted. Fascinating stories, masterfully told, bring to life the notable patients who suffered with these strange maladies, and the extraordinary doctors who treated them as they sought cures. This is essential and engaging reading for anyone who wants to understand these most interesting medical and philosophical issues, and how they have played out across continents and centuries. David Silbersweig, MD, chairman, Department of Psychiatry, co-director, Center for the Neurosciences, Brigham and Women s Hospital; Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
A page-turner vividly depicting the struggles of medicine s perennial sibling rivals: neurology and psychiatry. The dramatic interactions between clinical investigators and patients occasionally one and the same demonstrate how ideas relating mind to brain pervasively influence our sense of ourselves. Paul McHugh, MD, Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
"Through tales of eminent physicians and their suffering patients, replete with sex, drugs, and magnetically-induced hypnotism, we learn how a bacterium that deprived countless souls of their reason also helped scientists discover a role for brain biology in mental illness." Alan Jasanoff, PhD, author of The Biological Mind; Professor of Biological Engineering, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Nuclear Science & Engineering
Know someone who has bizarre thoughts or strange behaviors? Ever wonder whether it means mental illness or a brain disease or both? Ropper and Burrell have written an insightful, fantastically readable analysis of what was once called hysteria. Also, by studying how things can go wrong, we learn a great deal about the working of the human mind when things go right. Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine; author of Eyewitness Testimony
It is remarkable how much influence syphilis has had on human history and how widespread the disease has been. Even today, the subject is generally off limits, which is why the story remains mostly unknown and why How the Brain Lost Its Mind makes for compelling reading. Like all well written histories and this one is very well written the narrative engages like a mystery novel. But the story is true, and replete with sometimes salacious, sometimes revelatory details. Ultimately, it is the story of the beginning and development of the modern scientific study of the brain and the mind: the false leads and great discoveries, the charlatans and the heroes. The question of what is a disease of the brain and what is an illness of the mind remains undetermined even in our knowledgeable and enlightened era. A fascinating and sophisticated read." Avi Nelson
"A compelling read." Library Journal
I have listened to, watched, and read Allan Ropper on subjects related to the brain for thirty years. He's still my teacher, but I've never seen him teach like this. Along with his friend and gifted co-author, Ropper takes us on a romp through centuries of cultural and scientific history. There's a kicker: can that history clarify and crystallize through the lens of just one nasty disease? Yes. Read how in this page-turningly accessible and brilliant book. Edison K. Miyawaki, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; author of The Frontal Brain and Language
A thrilling journey from the dramatic common origins of neurology and psychiatry, through their historical divergence, to their current realignment. The medical, scientific and social histories of two fascinating conditions are brilliantly interwoven and contrasted. Fascinating stories, masterfully told, bring to life the notable patients who suffered with these strange maladies, and the extraordinary doctors who treated them as they sought cures. This is essential and engaging reading for anyone who wants to understand these most interesting medical and philosophical issues, and how they have played out across continents and centuries. David Silbersweig, MD, chairman, Department of Psychiatry, co-director, Center for the Neurosciences, Brigham and Women s Hospital; Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
A page-turner vividly depicting the struggles of medicine s perennial sibling rivals: neurology and psychiatry. The dramatic interactions between clinical investigators and patients occasionally one and the same demonstrate how ideas relating mind to brain pervasively influence our sense of ourselves. Paul McHugh, MD, Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
"Through tales of eminent physicians and their suffering patients, replete with sex, drugs, and magnetically-induced hypnotism, we learn how a bacterium that deprived countless souls of their reason also helped scientists discover a role for brain biology in mental illness." Alan Jasanoff, PhD, author of The Biological Mind; Professor of Biological Engineering, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Nuclear Science & Engineering
Know someone who has bizarre thoughts or strange behaviors? Ever wonder whether it means mental illness or a brain disease or both? Ropper and Burrell have written an insightful, fantastically readable analysis of what was once called hysteria. Also, by studying how things can go wrong, we learn a great deal about the working of the human mind when things go right. Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine; author of Eyewitness Testimony
It is remarkable how much influence syphilis has had on human history and how widespread the disease has been. Even today, the subject is generally off limits, which is why the story remains mostly unknown and why How the Brain Lost Its Mind makes for compelling reading. Like all well written histories and this one is very well written the narrative engages like a mystery novel. But the story is true, and replete with sometimes salacious, sometimes revelatory details. Ultimately, it is the story of the beginning and development of the modern scientific study of the brain and the mind: the false leads and great discoveries, the charlatans and the heroes. The question of what is a disease of the brain and what is an illness of the mind remains undetermined even in our knowledgeable and enlightened era. A fascinating and sophisticated read." Avi Nelson
"A compelling read." Library Journal
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