Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

But whereas the first half of the twentieth century marked a period of enormous progress in other areas of medicine, by the time Arthur arrived at Creedmoor, American physicians were still largely mystified by the function and dysfunction of the human mind. They could recognize a condition like schizophrenia, but they could only guess at what might cause it, much less how to treat it. As the novelist Virginia Woolf (who suffered from mental illness herself) once observed, there is “a poverty of the language” when it comes to certain infirmities. “The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

"A poverty of the language" is a wonderful concept