From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression by Clark Lawlor

Abstract

Health & History ● 15/2 ● 2013 125 what they believed was a contagious disease, Chapter 3 argues that in actual practice, army doctors drew on both western medical practices and traditional medicine to treat their patients. In this way, the book also provides a window to the transition from East Asian traditional medicine to scientific medicine, and evidence of medical pluralism (which continues to this day.) In 1921, Ōmori Kenta, professor of medicine at Keiō University Medical School presented his research findings that beriberi was caused by a lack of vitamin B in the diet (Chapter 5). After continued resistance, by 1939, the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Department of Public Health and Prevention moved to standardise rice milling to ensure that people received enough of the vitamin. The outbreak of war with China in 1937 meant that the Japanese government had to take decisive action (Chapter 6). This book is arguably one of the most significant studies published in English on the history of Japanese medicine since William Johnston’s magisterial study of The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995). It is engagingly written, with each chapter beginning with an historical episode that throws light on the concerns of each chapter. The content is very accessible with no prior knowledge of Japan or medicine required. At the same time, it offers a sophisticated study of a complex topic. As the author so convincingly shows, at stake was not only the lives of soldiers, the health of the nation, and the good of the empire, but also scholarly reputations. MORRIS LOW UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ISBN 978 0 19 958579 3 (HC). xi + 265pp. This elegantly written book begins by vividly describing the lifelong miseries of body and mind that afflicted Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century lexicographer and critic. Physically Johnson was a large man who suffered from a multiplicity of ailments that ‘gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking’. He was also haunted by the events of his childhood, the terrors of which we can 126 BOOK REVIEWS only guess. Visiting the town of his birthplace, the aged and ailing Johnson alarmed friends by visiting a local market place, where he stood a considerable time in the cold, pouring rain, doing penance for refusing to look after his bookseller father’s stall, when it stood on the same spot over fifty years before. Much of the first half of this book draws on a variety of texts, from the Graeco-Roman era to our own times, to fashion equally engaging and sympathetic portraits of men and women tortured by the anxiety and overwhelming sadness that we now know as depression. Chapter 1 explores a range of Greek literary and medical texts, focusing in particular on the Galenic tradition of accounting for abnormal behaviour as stemming from humoural imbalances within the bodily economy. The author also draws attention to the long-lasting idea that melancholy was all too often essential to genius, having its origins in Aristotelian thought. They note too that with Christianity, depressive illness additionally came to be understood in terms of personal consciousness of sin and attendant fears of damnation. Chapter 2 traces discursive representations of melancholia during the early modern period, drawing attention to the persistent, but not unchanging nature, of Galenic psychology and the Aristotelian notion of melancholy as essential to intellectual and artistic creativity. The chapter convincingly uses the dramatic example of Hamlet to illustrate the complexities of accounting for anxiety and sadness by the early sixteenth century. Chapter 3 covers relatively well-known ground, explaining how the new physics of the seventeenth century informed the way in which the nature and causation of profound sadness and anxiety were understood in western European scientific and wider intellectual circles. Older, Galenic humouralist physiology was now synthesised with perceptions of the body as essentially a mechanical system, animated by the same forces sustaining observable regularities in the physical universe. By the mid-eighteenth century, this explanatory framework had undergone an important shift to encompass the idea...