Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England

Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England

Hardback (18 Jul 1991)

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Publisher's Synopsis

Janet Oppenheim's book explores an illness that figures in nearly every volume of Victorian autobiography, memoirs, diaries, letters, and more than a few novels. Variously described as shattered nerves, nervous collapse, neurasthenia, or nervous breakdown, the illness was the focus of extensive medical discussion during the Victorian and Edwardian decades. Few doctors could decide whether nervous breakdown was a physiological disorder, to be cured by medication, or a moral weakness for which the patient needed psychiatric care. Oppenheim uses the letters, diaries, and autobiographies of men and women who suffered breakdowns, examines medical archives, published scientific sources, and contemporary fiction, in which the `nervous type' was so familiar as to border on caricature. Shattered Nerves places a puzzling medical problem in its full social, cultural, and intellectual context.

Book information

ISBN: 9780195057812
Publisher: OUP USA
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 616.852700942
DEWEY edition: 20
Language: English
Number of pages: 388
Weight: 738g
Height: 241mm
Width: 165mm
Spine width: 27mm