Great Discoveries in Psychiatry
About this ebook
Told here are stories of how an Australian psychiatrist single-handedly discovered an effective medication for mania and why it was never patented; what an eighteenth century physician found beneath the skull of patients residing at a hospital where the infamous Marquis de Sade staged plays; the eery X-rays that revealed the first biomarker for schizophrenia; how magnetic resonance imaging detects damaged nerve bundles by tracking water molecules in the brain; what a pig slaughterhouse contributed to the treatment of depression. And much more.
Taken in their entirety, the chapters cover all or most of the major topics in psychiatry, namely care and treatment, diagnostics, biomarkers, and neuroscience. They follow a rough chronological order beginning around the year 1800 and continuing right through to the present.
Deeply researched and fully referenced, the language is non-technical. Sixty-six illustrations accompany the text. This book will help people understand where psychiatry has come from and where it is likely headed.
About the author
Ronald Chase is Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Montréal. He was educated at Stanford University (A.B. Psychology) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. Psychology). After postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, and the University of Washington, he taught neurobiology in the Department of Biology at McGill University. He is the author of more than eighty peer-reviewed research articles. Previous books are "Behavior and its Neural Control in Gastropod Molluscs", "The Physical Basis of Mental Illness", "Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science", and "The Making of Modern Psychiatry".
