New Books in Medicine

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways.

In The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health (Princeton UP, 2024), Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health--actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life's turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain--from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods--a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend--work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders.

Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.

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Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.”

Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs.

In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design.

In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.

Joy Knoblauch is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture's engagement with politics and science.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the conscience of U.S. science,” wholeheartedly embraced Krebiozen. Ivy’s impeccable credentials and reputation made the treatment seem like another midcentury medical miracle. But after years of controversy, the improbable saga ended with Krebiozen proved a sham, its inventor fleeing the country, and Ivy’s reputation and legacy in ruins.

Matthew C. Ehrlich’s history of Krebiozen tells a quintessential story of quackery. Though most experts dismissed the treatment, it found passionate public support not only among cancer patients but also people in good health. The treatment’s rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s never-ending suspicion of educational, scientific, and medical expertise. In addition, Ehrlich examines why people readily believe misinformation and struggle to maintain hope in the face of grave threats to well-being.

A dramatic account of fraud and misplaced trust, The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine (U Illinois Press, 2024) shines a light on a forgotten medical scandal and its all-too-familiar relevance in the twenty-first century.

Matthew C. Ehrlich is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois. He has previously published five books including Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK and Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era.

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From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles - a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor - psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illustrates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.

Mariana Craciun is Associate Professor in Sociology at Tulane University. As a cultural sociologist, she is interested in the issues of expertise, professions, science, and technology. Her writings on psychotherapeutic expertise and authority and was published in top peer reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future. 

Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

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The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the struggle against cholera. Davis’ birds-eye view of this hundred-year period illustrates that the conditions allowing cholera to flourish were the same set of conditions that helped create the collapse of the tsarist regime during the First World War. Credit for elimination of cholera must go to the Bolsheviks, both for implementing tsarist-era medical theory, and especially for making war on cholera in a organized, systematic manner that the old regime was variously unable or unwilling to achieve.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.

Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself.

Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Ellen Hampton's Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle Against the Nazi Occupation of France (LSU Press, 2023) tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Another team of medics organized a cabal focused on intelligence gathering and sabotage that became one of the largest in wartime France, even after the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned its leaders. Deported to concentration camps, these physicians continued to frustrate Nazi efforts by rendering aid and keeping their fellow prisoners alive. Others joined rural guerrilla camps to care for the young conscripts fighting to block German reinforcements from reaching Normandy after the D-Day landing.

These stories, assembled here for the first time, add a crucial dimension to the history of Occupied France. Written for both historians and general readers of World War II history, Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil. It serves as a window into life under a fascist regime and the travails of doctors who negotiated the terrifying moral labyrinth that was the German military's occupation of France.

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In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (U Chicago Press, 2024) explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

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Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.

This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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