Presumed Curable

Preface; The study of the history of medicine, and especially that of psychiatry, often induces in the modern reader an understandable sense of relief that he or she is living in today's world, and not at any point in the past. Yet the stories of the patients in this book, representatives of many hundreds admitted to Bethlem Hospital in the late Victorian period, will resonate with all who take an interest in mental health care today. In these early years of our own twenty-first century, the fear and stigma associated with major mental illness remain strong. Psychiatrists and professionals in allied disciplines involved in the care and treatment of people with mental health problems still face disorders of uncertain aetiology that devastate the lives of sufferers and their families and for which there are no 'cures'. The advent of effective treatments for mood disorders and the symptoms of psychosis, some fifty years after the events detailed in this book, did of course result in tremendous improvements in prognosis and the alleviation of suffering. The nineteenth-century casebooks of Bethlem Hospital give relatively little information about the physical and chemical treatments app