Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970

by Martin Halliwell

Halliwell, Dr. Martin

382 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good work that covers post-war developments in mental and physical health. Halliwell basically sees a dialectic between 1945 and 1970, where the thesis is fragmentation (war demobilization, Cold War anxiety, readjustment), the antithesis is organization (top-down medical authority), and the synthesis is reorganization (bottom-up pluralist healthcare). Although I knew "medicine" and "culture" were in the title and that Halliwell discusses it in the introduction, I was mainly interested in mental health and literature, so the lengthy analyses of health policies and films wasn't very interesting to me and I mostly skipped them. The stuff on mental health was pretty good, although it's easy to get bogged down in all the dates, abbreviated organizations, and policy details; the thread of the narrative is easy to lose amid the scholarly punctiliousness. However, at the end of each chapter, Halliwell does summarize the overall gist, which was helpful.