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Last Of The Lunatics

By: John Cawte

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Paperback | 29 March 2024 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
190 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.34 x 13.72 x 1.32

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A searing historical account of the treatment of the mentally ill in our society before the invention of tranquillizers.

John Cawte looks back in amazement to his years as a young doctor in an Australian madhouse. He now recognises the people he treated in the early 1950s as 'the last of the lunatics'.

Anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs were unknown. Bursting asylums, housing an uproar of insanity, were wastelands of stigma and dread. 'Management' techniques ranged from straitjackets and padded cells to isolation and primitive shock treatments.

Miraculously, Cawte's case notes were saved from destruction. Rereading them after forty years, he was gripped by the horror they revealed and the questions they raised. Much has changed for the better. Many of the fearful illnesses he recorded have disappeared, treatments are vastly more effective and stigma has lessened. But his notes hold a surprising and challenging lesson-that temporary 'asylum' from the stresses of life is often all that a disturbed person needs for recovery.

The Last of the Lunatics is rich and moving. The personal stories recorded by a perceptive young man have been filtered by experience and sharpened by telling literary references. Doctors, psychiatrists, those who remember and those who wonder about the human condition will be touched by this compassionate book.

Industry Reviews

The real pleasure of this book lies in the refreshing lack of jargon, its honesty and simplicity and its puncturing of the balloons of political correctness. There is also a wonderful collection of case histories which all psychiatrists will immediately feel at home with despite the intervening years and technological developments. It is a thoughtful book and a wise one. It seamlessly connects our psychiatric past and present and forcefully brings to mind the fate of those who forget their own history. "Canadian Psychiatric Journal""

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Medicine Medicine in General Health Systems & Services Other Branches of Medicine Clinical Psychology History General & World History Fiction Psychology Psychiatry History of Medicine

Biographies & True Stories Biographies Science, Technology & Medicine Biographies

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Prologue	p. 1
The Hound of the Baskervilles	p. 9
An Airing Court in 1950	p. 23
Asylum Apprentice	p. 29
Asylum Doctors	p. 38
The Watch for Brain Syphilis	p. 46
Grapes from Thorns, Figs from Thistles	p. 51
The Receiving House	p. 57
A Personal Analysis	p. 66
From Shock Treatments to Indian Snakeroot	p. 72
Mania	p. 80
Aladdin and his Lamp	p. 96
Turbulent and Dangerous Lunacy	p. 108
Horrors from the Drink	p. 123
The Four Million of O. Henry	p. 138
Outback Insanity	p. 148
A Pilgrimage	p. 155
A Philosophy of Psychiatry	p. 162
Epilogue	p. 173
Notes	p. 175
Title page from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy	p. 176
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Last Of The Lunatics

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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