Therapeutic Revolutions, the first part of a broader inquiry into American medical history and culture, focuses on the immediate postwar period and takes the analysis as far as the 1970s. The second part of this study, which is currently in development, will centre on the final three decades of the twentieth century, and could conceivably extend into the twenty-first century. Martin Halliwell, the book’s author, is Professor of American Studies at Leicester University and an international authority on postwar US culture. In recent times, he has written about Modernism and Morality, Images of Idiocy and Progressive Rock since the 1960s. Yet, in this diverse, dynamic and complicated volume, he marshals a remarkable range of sources, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to The Bell Jar, as a means to examine medicine and culture or, as he frames it, ‘discourses of illness, health and therapy as they evolved in the 25 years following World War II’. He does so ‘by combining discussions of subjects that range from national politics, public reports, and health care debates’ with ‘culture and the media’. A significant highlight of the book is its emphasis on race and mental health. Of course, it is well known that race and insanity have a long, variegated and troubled past in the United States, and such authors as Jonathan Metzl and Matthew Gambino have sought to locate blacks within asylum history and expose how race is written into definitions of mental illness. Yet, here Halliwell, to his credit, enhances the understanding of the relationship between African American mental health and institutional psychiatry by viewing the negotiation through the lens of culture. Using such films as Shock Corridor and A Raisin in the Sun, as well as novels, including Richard Wright’s The Outsider and James Baldwin’s Another Country, Halliwell recognises how mental health services have been shaped by and delivered in a racially charged milieu. While doctors’ files and patient records are not used here, this absence does not markedly detract from Halliwell’s cultural analysis.
More broadly, having written numerous well-received and influential monographs on music, fiction and film, among a host of other topics, Halliwell is well positioned to describe the intersection of medicine and culture. With Therapeutic Revolutions, which builds on recent scholarship by Michael Staub, Bradley Lewis and Linda Sargent Wood, Halliwell convincingly positions medicine and psychiatry if not within, then certainly alongside, American culture. He argues that the ‘broad social interactions and the spread of therapeutic ideas’ and revolutions in both medicine and psychiatry connected ‘closely to other forces in the cultural sphere’. Halliwell’s methodological approach reduces his twenty-five-year period to three distinct, but straightforward, historical phases: ‘fragmentation’ (1945–53) runs from WWII to the end of the Korean War, whereas ‘organization’ (1953–61) aligns with the Eisenhower administration. Finally, the section titled ‘reorganization’ (1961–70) matches the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Overall, the ‘broad sociocultural framework’ he utilises is founded upon a ‘two cultures’ theory, which itself establishes a dialectic between ways of understanding medical knowledge. At different stages, he writes, the bio-medical model was pressured by and engaged in a process of negotiation with various alternative approaches to health and well-being, including ideas from the Frankfurt School and the antipsychiatric movement. However, what becomes clear rather early on is that Halliwell’s aim is to chart the ebb and flow and rise and fall of various mainstream and counter-cultural discourses, not to advocate in support of one particular side or propose a victor. As he puts it, ‘I want to resist countering one heroic narrative of medicine with another (…)’. Thus, Therapeutic Revolutions avoids any overarching ascension or declension narratives as it chronicles the relationship among American psychiatry, medicine and culture. Looking ahead, this monograph will likely become influential if not indispensable reading for scholars of American medical and psychiatric history.
