Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T22:32:58.580Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Thomas S. Szasz
Thomas S. Szasz*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, New York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Let us try to project ourselves back into the places and minds of physicians and psychiatrists in, say, 1900. When they spoke of disease, what did they mean? They meant, typically, something like syphilis. ‘Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations,’ declared Sir William Osler (1849–1919), ‘and all things clinical will be added unto you.’ (1). Obviously, this is no longer true. Indeed, how many cases of syphilis do modern medical students see between the time they enroll in school and the time they graduate? In the United States, Osier's maxim has been replaced by another which asserts that ‘mental illness is our number one health problem‘. This would make schizophrenia—the most common and most disabling of the so-called mental diseases—the successor of Osier's syphilis, showing us immediately what a gulf separates us from him. For, clearly, a physician may know all there is to know about schizophrenia, and yet be totally ignorant of medicine.

Type
Papers
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 129 , Issue 4 , October 1976 , pp. 308 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1976 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Osler, W., quoted in Strauss, M. B., ed. (1968) Familiar Medical Quotations, p. 651. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
2 Quoted in: Schizophrenia: specificity remains a very thorny issue, Roche Report (1975) Frontiers of Psychiatry, 5, 5—6 (15 April), p 5.Google Scholar
3 See, generally, Szasz, T. S. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Hoeber-Harper. Revised Edition, New York: Harper & Row, 1974.Google Scholar
4 Meynert, T. (1890) Klinische Vorlesungen über Psychiatrie auf wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen. Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller.Google Scholar
5 Zilboorg, G. (1941) A History of Medical Psychology, p 44. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
6 See Breutsch, W. L. (1959) Neurosyphilitic conditions: general paralysis, general paresis, dementia paralytica, chronic brain syndrome associated with syphilitic meningoencephalitis. In American Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol II (ed. Arieti, S.), pp 1003—20. New York: Basic Books, p 1005.Google Scholar
7 Kraepelin, E. (1917) One Hundred Years of Psychiatry (trans. by Baskin, Wade, 1962), pp 151—2. New York: Philosophical Library.Google Scholar
8 See, generally, Virchow, Rudolf In The Encyclopaedia Britannica; Macropaedia, (1974) Vol 19, pp 150—1; and Ackerknecht, E. H. (1953) Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
9 See Virchow, Rudolf (1935) In Funk and Wagnall's New Standard Encyclopaedia, 6th ed., Vol 10, not paged. Chicago: Standard Encyclopedia Corp.Google Scholar
10 Arieti, S. (1959) Schizophrenia: the manifest symptomatology, the psychodynamic and formal mechanisms. In American Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol I (ed. Arieti, S.), pp 455—84. New York: Basic Books, p 456.Google Scholar
11 Ibid.Google Scholar
12 Batchelor, I. R. C. (1969) Henderson and Gillespie's Textbook of Psychiatry, Tenth Edition, p 247. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
13 Bleuler, E. (1911) Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (trans. by Zinkin, Joseph, 1950). New York: International Universities Press.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., p 9. Google Scholar
15 Ibid., p 147.Google Scholar
16 McGuire, W., ed. (1974) The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (trans. by Mannheim, Ralph and Hull, R. F. C.), p 563. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
17 Freud, S. (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life . In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol VI (1960). London: Hogarth Press.Google Scholar
18 Strachey, J. (1960) Introduction, ibid., pp xiii—xiv.Google Scholar
19 Freud, , op. cit., p 257.Google Scholar
20 World Health Organization (1973) Report of the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia, Vol I: Results of the Initial Evaluation Phase. Geneva: WHO.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., p 10.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.