A History of Psychiatry Quotes

“If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.”
― Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac

“In 1833, chemists isolated the alkaloid hyoscyamine from henbane and the Merck company in Darmstadt began marketing it for various nonpsychiatric indications. Finally in 1868, the Viennese pharmacologist Karl Schroff established that hyoscyamus acted as a sedative and hypnotic.”
― Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac