Madhouse
Book description
"Reads as much like a novel as it does a work of medical scholarship."-Patrick McGrath, New York Times Book Review
Madhouse revealsa long-suppressed medical scandal, shocking in its brutality and sobering in its implications. It shows how a leading American psychiatrist of the early twentieth century came to believe that…
Why read it?
1 author picked Madhouse as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Although Madhouse reads like a Stephen King novel, everything it recounts is actually true. At the turn of the twentieth century, Henry Cotton, a psychiatrist and the medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton, thought he had found the solution to mental illness. His unconventional approach to treatment, however, left more people dead and disfigured than effectively cured. Andrew Scull’s deeply-researched narrative of Cotton’s medical interventions is a horrifying, yet entirely gripping, account of the lengths people have gone in the name of psychiatric treatment.
From Emily's list on rethinking your sanity.
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