| | |
Summary: 670 BOOK REVIEWS--ISIS, 93 : 4 (2002)
sanity and madness. In the face of his close and
scholarly microanalyses, he never loses sight of
the broad humanistic nature of the literary en-
gagement with psychological suffering. Lucid
and readable throughout, his style is refreshingly
free from literary-critical jargon.
Readers in the history of science and medicine
may also have a few regrets about Thiher's book.
First, it reveals several glaring historiographical
gaps (e.g., no citation of the publications of Otto
Marx, George Mora, Henri Ellenberger, or Wer-
ner and Annemarie Leibbrand in the chapter on
German Romantic medicine). Second, reflecting
a preoccupation of literary criticism today,
Thiher adopts a thoroughly linguistic model of
reality: madness is essentially a textual trope
characterized by "a fall from language," a char-
acterization that a good many clinicians and his-
torians--to say nothing of psychiatric suffer-
|
