Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Since its publication in 1989, Console and Classify has become a classic work in the history of science and in French intellectual history. Now with a new afterword, this much-cited and much-discussed book gives readers the chance to revisit the rise of psychiatry in nineteenth-century France, the shape it took and why, and its importance both then and in contemporary society. Goldstein has raised our understanding of the politics of psychiatric professionalization on to a new plane.-Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement [A]n historiographical tour de force, quite simply the most insightful work on the subject in English or any other language. . . . [A] work of distinctive originality. . . . It is written with lucidity and elegance, even a certain confident scholarly panache, that make it a pleasure to read.-Toby Gelfand, Social History Exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and persuasively argued, Console and Classify is an excellent example of the . . . sociologically informed intellectual history, stimulated by Kuhn and Foucault.-Robert Alun Jones, American Journal of Sociology