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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

SHOCK THERAPY

Edward Shorter David Healy

A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness

The electroshock story is one of the great unknown stories of modern medicine. Considered by many to be the penicillin for the severely mentally ill, it fell out favor in the 1960s for curious, cultural reasons. Only recently is it experiencing a comeback.

This book is appealing on three levels. It is a lively and evocative social history from the 1930s to today, including recent experiments in Deep Brain Stimulation. It is illuminating on the science of the brain in mental illness. And it is a work of advocacy which will influence the thinking about shock therapy.

One of the most interesting aspects in the history of medicine and culture is how and why such an effective treatment fell out of favor when there was nothing substantially better to replace it.

Edward Shorter is a renowned scholar and author. He is a professor of history at the University of Toronto.
David Healy is currently a Professor of Psychological Medicine in Wales. He is the author of
15 books. He runs the pharmacology safety website rxisk.com.
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Book

Published 2007-09-01 by Rutgers University Press

Comments

An important and compelling history of ECT, the life-saving but much maligned treatment. Shorter and Healy have given us a work that is at once scholarly and wonderfully readable. -- Charles H. Kellner, M.D., Chair of the New Jersey Medical School Department of Psychiatry