When asked to compare the practice of medicine today to that of a hundred years ago, most people will respond with a story of therapeutic revolution: back then we had few effective remedies, now we have more (and more powerful) tools to fight disease. In this version of history, medicine was made modern and effectual by medicines. The aim of "Therapeutic Revolutions" is to challenge the linearity of this historical narrative, provide a thicker explanation of the process of therapeutic transformation, and explore the complex relationships between medicines and social change. Working on three continents and touching upon the lived experiences of patients and physicians, consumers and providers, marketers and regulators, the contributors to this volume together reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the specificity of local sites in which they are put into practice, asking, collectively: what is revolutionary about therapeutics? "

This book is not about one glorious triumph after another, nor is it a series of complaints about doctors and hospitals. Rather, these essays examine American medicine within its context, sensitive to the role of medical knowledge, practitioners, and institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The selections not only cover general considerations of the social and cultural context in which American medicine developed but also analyze the relationship between science and medicine, the development of mental hospitals, nursing, and health insurance.

Therapeutic Revolutions examines the evolving relationship between American medicine, psychiatry, and culture from World War II to the dawn of the 1970s. In this richly layered intellectual history, Martin Halliwell ranges from national politics, public reports, and healthcare debates to the ways in which film, literature, and the mass media provided cultural channels for shaping and challenging preconceptions about health and illness. Beginning with a discussion of the profound impact of World War II and the Cold War on mental health, Halliwell moves from the influence of work, family, and growing up in the Eisenhower years to the critique of institutional practice and the search for alternative therapeutic communities during the 1960s. Blending a discussion of such influential postwar thinkers as Erich Fromm, William Menninger, Erving Goffman, Erik Erikson, and Herbert Marcuse with perceptive readings of a range of cultural text that illuminate mental health issues--among them Spellbound, Shock Corridor, Revolutionary Road, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden--this compelling study argues that the postwar therapeutic revolutions closely interlink contrasting discourses of authority and liberation.

Collection of author's essays previously published individually