Main description:

Looks at a range of different sources, both institutional and private, usual and unusual, that can be used in writing the history of psychiatry and interrogates and analyses how they can be used so that the reader can get a sense of the range and complexity of the subject.
Every student of history has to engage with sources and the history of medicine is very solidly popular - it will be useful for students to see how historians use different sources to interrogate one aspect of the history of medicine.
There is nothing out there that discusses the range and breadth of sources available for the study of such a subject that is often difficult to interrogate at other than an institutional level, but which is becoming increasingly important.

Contents:

Introduction, 1. Asylum Records: Files, Notes, Casebooks, and Patient Registers, 2. Photographic Sources in the History of Psychiatry, 3. Using Asylum Post-Mortem Records in the History of Psychiatry, 4. Psychiatry's Material Culture: The Symbolic Power of the Straitjacket, 5. Medical Journals, 6. Experiments in Life: Literature's Contribution to the History of Psychiatry, 7. Sources and Methods in the Histories of Colonial Psychiatry, 8. Legal Sources in the History of Psychiatry, 9. Removing the 'Veil of Secrecy': Public Inquiries as Sources in the History of Psychiatry, 1960s-1970s, 10. Activist Sources and the Survivor Movement, 11. Patients, Practitioners, and Protestors: Feminist Sources and Approaches in the History of Psychiatry, 12. Using Art in the History of Psychiatry, 13. Using Film in the History of Psychiatry, 14. Oral History in the History of Psychiatry