“Scull’s book is a wonderful, lucid exposition of this story … well written—at times funny and at other times cutting—and in almost every chapter provoking of further questions about the nature of medicine, medical practice, and human identity.”
Stephen Casper, Social History of Medicine
“Much more than a superior work of historical synthesis. Scull expertly traces the story of hysteria as concept, diagnosis, cultural expression and lived experience, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, and sheds new light and offers new insights throughout. As an introduction to the turbulent and contested history of this most mutable but strangely enduring of disorders, Scull’s book could not be bettered.”
Ralph Harrington, Metapsychology