The father of allopathic medicine, the father of toxicology, and an iconoclast who encouraged doctors to listen to women knowledgeable in healing arts and who encouraged women to understand the workings of their own bodies rather than blindly accepting the proclamations of male docs, he also came within a hair’s breadth of enunciating the principles of segregation of alleles and of dominance and recession – three centuries before Mendel.
Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - known to later ages as Paracelsus - stands on the borderline between medieval and modern; a name that is familiar but a man who has been hard to perceive or understand. Contemporary of Luther, enemy of established medicine, scourge of the universities ('at all the German schools you cannot learn as much as at the Frankfurt Fair'), army surgeon and alchemist, myths about him - from his treating diseases from beyond the grave in mid-nineteenth century Salzburg to his Faustian bargain with the devil to regain his youth - have been far more…
Psychiatric genetics is now entering its second century. Lifetimes of work, billions of dollars spent, and not a single finding that has benefitted a single patient anywhere in the world.
Moreover, these labors are a preposterous distraction from addressing the real causes of those complaints that fall under the diagnostic rubric of “mental illness” – abuse, trauma, loss, and so forth. It’s time to move on.
Schizophrenia is a widely investigated psychiatric condition, and though there have been claims of gene "associations," decades of molecular genetic studies have failed to produce confirmed causative genes. In this book, Joseph focuses on the methodological shortcomings of schizophrenia genetic research.
His findings have major implications not only on how we understand the causes of schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, but also on how we understand the causes of human behavior in general. Chapters explore the differing theoretical concepts of schizophrenia, molecular genetic research around schizophrenia, family, twin, and adoption studies, and non-medical prevention and intervention strategies. Prominent researchers and…
The Genain Sisters were the most famous case history in psychiatric genetics, and to this day are held up as proof of the supposed genetic basis of those conditions called “mental illness.” But, in fact, their sad story ended up revealing far more about the arrogance and willful blindness of its chroniclers than it did about its purported subjects.
For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an “intimate and compassionate portrait” (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences, from the author of The Unfit Heiress.
In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame…
The coronavirus pandemic has hit the nation and the world like a tsunami, so much so that history seems to divide into pre- and post-covid. We have entered a Bizarro World in which all the things that allow us to co-exist as a civilization of intelligent, self-governing men and women—work, school, church, fresh air, outdoor exercise, entrepreneurship, love, friendship, verve, spontaneity, joyous celebration, the human face—have been relentlessly downgraded. We are being asked to give up most of the things that make life worth living—including sovereignty over our own bodies—in exchange for a fantasy of never dying. This transaction deserves perhaps more scrutiny than it has received.
