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By Thomas S Szasz, MD. Price, $8.95. Pp 321, Harper & Row, 49 E 33rd St, New York 10016, 1970.

Charles D. Aring, MD, Reviewer
Cincinnati

Arch Intern Med. 1970;126(6):1073-1074.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

The primary message that I derive from this endlessly fascinating book is that sense cannot be made of some of our great moral, sociological, and political problems if they are allowed to remain in the domain of medicine generally, and psychiatry in particular.

With a wealth of learning and an often unnerving logical precision (as John P. Roche said about another of the author's books, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry), Szasz who is professor of psychiatry at Syracuse, examines the social actions during the witch hunt of the Inquisition, comparing them with those resulting currently because of the belief in mental illness. A striking revelation in his analysis is the misuse made in modern psychiatric history of the analogy that witches are considered generally to have been persons bereft of their reason rather than scapegoats. Zilboorg (Medical Man and Witch, p 73) is quoted as follows: "... no doubt is left in . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Communications to this Department may be sent directly to Robert H. Moser, MD, the Maui Medical Group, 99 Market St, Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii 96793, or to the Chief Editor for transmittal to him.

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