AHP readers may be interested in a new open-access piece in Social History of Medicine: “‘Malaria Has Spoilt It’: Malaria, Neuropsychiatric Complications, and Insanity in ex-Servicemen in Post-First World War Britain,” Justin Fantauzzo. Abstract:

This article focuses on the cases of two British ex-servicemen who contracted malaria during or immediately after the First World War, were charged with murder in the 1920s, and pled insanity due to their malaria and long-term neuropsychiatric complications. One was found ‘guilty but insane’ and committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in June 1923, while the other was convicted and hanged in July 1927. It argues that, at a time when the medical community sought out the causes of mental disease in the physical body, medico-legal arguments about malaria and insanity were received inconsistently by inter-war British courts. Class, education, social status, institutional support and the nature of the crime all mattered, as they had in the diagnoses, treatment and trials of other ex-servicemen with psychiatric illnesses.

A new open-access piece in Social History of Medicine may interest AHP readers: “Sounding the Archival Silence: Searching for Music in the Nineteenth-Century English Asylum,” Rosemary Golding. Abstract:

The music of the nineteenth-century English asylum provides a rare insight into the place of music within the structure of a medical institution during this period. Yet with archives literally ‘silent’, how far can the sound and experience of music be retrieved and reconstructed? Drawing on critical archive theory and the idea of the soundscape as well as musicological and historical practice, this article questions how we can investigate asylum soundscapes through the silences of the archive, and how we can use the resulting processes to deepen our relationship with the archive and enrichen other aspects of historical and archive studies. I argue that in drawing attention to new forms of evidence in order to address the literal ‘silence’ of the nineteenth-century asylum, new approaches to metaphorical ‘silences’ can be found.

A piece in the New Yorker that explores the history of imposter syndrome may interest AHP readers: “Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It,” by Leslie Jamison. As Jamison writes:

At first, the paper kept getting rejected. “Weirdly, we didn’t get impostor feelings about that,” Clance told me, when I visited her at her home, in Atlanta. “We believed in what we were trying to say.” It was eventually published in 1978, in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice. The paper spread like an underground zine. People kept writing to Clance to ask for copies, and she sent out so many that the person working the copy machine in her department asked, “What are you doing with all these?” For decades, Clance and Imes saw their concept steadily gaining traction—in 1985, Clance published a book, “The Impostor Phenomenon,” and also released an official “I.P. scale” for researchers to license for use in their own studies—but it wasn’t until the rise of social media that the idea, by now rebranded as “impostor syndrome,” truly exploded.

AHP readers may be interested in a new piece in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: “Illustrating insanity: Allan McLane Hamilton, Types of Insanity, and physiognomy in late nineteenth-century American medicine,” by Sebastian C. Galbo Icon & Keith C. Mages. Abstract:

This article examines the divisive reception history of American psychiatrist and neurologist Alexander McLane Hamilton’s physiognomy publication, Types of Insanity (1883). By analyzing 23 book reviews published in late-nineteenth-century medical journals, the authors present a bibliographic case study that traces the mixed professional reactions to Hamilton’s work, thus revealing the fraught nature of physiognomy in the American medical community. In effect, the authors argue that the interprofessional disagreements that emerged among journal reviewers indicate the nascent efforts of psychiatrists and neurologists to oppose physiognomy in the interest of professionalization. By extension, the authors emphasize the historical value of book reviews and reception literature. Often overlooked as ephemera, book reviews register the shifting ideologies, temperaments, and attitudes of an era’s readership.

A new piece in Isis may interest AHP readers: “Biometry against Fascism: Geoffrey Morant, Race, and Anti-Racism in Twentieth-Century Physical Anthropology,” by Iris Clever. Abstract:

This essay introduces an anthropological practice that remains largely unexplored in the historical literature on racial science: biometrics. In the early twentieth century, biometricians analyzed skull measurements using novel statistical methods to demonstrate racial biological differences. Drawing on new archival material, the essay reveals how these biometric data practices challenged racist anthropology. Between 1934 and 1952, Geoffrey Morant, an expert on biometry and race in Karl Pearson’s Biometric Laboratory in London, mobilized biometry to debunk Nazi racial theories. He informed the public about Nazism’s fallacies in The Races of Central Europe (1939) and his UNESCO pamphlet The Significance of Racial Differences (1952). Unlike anti-racism campaigners such as Ashley Montagu, however, Morant did not dismiss the biological reality of race in his fight against Nazi racism. The essay shows that the coexistence of anti-racist and racializing practices was not paradoxical but, rather, an important feature of the anthropological study of human variation in the twentieth century.

AHP readers may be interested in a new piece in History of the Human Sciences: “Psychoanalytic practice in the light of psychiatric patient records: The elusive history of Freudian-inspired psychotherapy (Strasbourg, 1940s–1970s),” Florent Serina. Abstract:

This article delves into a problem that is still seldom addressed by historians—namely, the use of medical records testifying to the implementation of a psychoanalytically inspired treatment within a psychiatric institution for historical research. Based on publications, a broad spectrum of medical patient records, and interviews with former practitioners, it more broadly addresses issues related to the attention to patients’ voices at the University Psychiatric Clinic of Strasbourg, a central institution of psychiatric care in Northeastern France that was once considered a bastion of French Freudianism. Eventually, it contends with the fundamentally elusive nature of medical patient records when it comes to talking cures, highlighting the challenges and limitations inherent in the historical exploitation of this type of source.

A new piece in History of Psychiatry may interest AHP readers: “Mortality among those certified under lunacy legislation in Scotland during World War I,” by Margaret White. Abstract:

Mortality in asylum populations increased during World War I. This paper seeks to analyse the mortality data from Scotland, where governmental statistics allow comparison between different lunacy institutions, poorhouses and prisons, as well as people certified under lunacy legislation but living in the community. Detailed study is made of two Lothian asylums, the Royal Edinburgh Asylum and the Midlothian and Peebles District Asylum, and the 1918 influenza pandemic is considered in the asylum context. Similarities and differences between the situation in Scotland and that in England and Wales are discussed, and parallels are drawn with the Covid-19 pandemic in Scotland.

A new open-access piece in History of the Human Sciences will interest AHP readers: “Trauma and loss in the Adult Attachment Interview: Situating the unresolved state of mind classification in disciplinary and social context,” Lianne Bakkum, Carlo Schuengel, Sarah L. Foster, R. M. Pasco Fearon, and Robbie Duschinsky. Abstract:

This article examines how ‘trauma’ has been conceptualised in the unresolved state of mind classification in the Adult Attachment Interview, introduced by Main and Hesse in 1990. The unresolved state of mind construct has been influential for three decades of research in developmental psychology. However, not much is known about how this measure of unresolved trauma was developed, and how it relates to other conceptualisations of trauma. We draw on previously unavailable manuscripts from Main and Hesse’s personal archive, including various editions of unpublished coding manuals, and on Main–Bowlby correspondence from the John Bowlby Archive at the Wellcome Trust in London. This article traces the emergence of the unresolved state of mind classification, and examines the assumptions about trauma embedded in the construct. These assumptions are situated both in the immediate context of the work of Main and Hesse and in terms of wider discourses about trauma in the period. Our analysis considers how a particular form of trauma discourse entered into attachment research, and in doing so partly lost contact with wider disciplinary study of trauma.

A new piece, now available online at History of Psychology, will interest AHP readers: “Reflections upon having been elected a fellow of APA,” Burman, J. T. Abstract:

In this article, the author offers his reflections on being elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association as an historian of psychology. The author didn’t start out as an historian. His bachelor and doctorate are both in psychology. But he did also certainly choose to leave psychology, then to return with a different perspective. So this election feels like an affirmation of that decision, and an endorsement of the scholarship that resulted: his service to science by other means, after he was himself “revised and resubmitted.” Nearly two decades after his original departure from experimental psychology, the author has decided that “science” is the set of tested- and defended boundaries of what we think we know, which move as they’re renegotiated. In other words, science is the shared collection and discussion of what has been accepted to be the case (as well as the process of careful revision). But it’s also then the history of science that provides evidence to answer the philosophical “demarcation problem,” not science itself.

AHP readers will be interested in a new online first article in History of Psychology: “The degree course in psychology in Rome in the history of Italian psychology,” Lombardo, G. P., & Romano, A. Abstract:

Italian academic psychology found its first location in the Anthropological Museum of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Rome, where in 1890 a Laboratory of Experimental Psychology was established. In 1905, the first three Chairs of Experimental Psychology at the Universities of Turin, Rome, and Naples were created. These were followed in the subsequent years by others, until 1930, in other academic institutions. After many years and a long period of crisis linked to the fascist regime, only after the World War II (WWII), with the rebirth of the country, did psychology gradually rebuild its status as a scientific discipline. Within this framework of the renewal of society and university studies, in 1971, two degree courses were instituted in Rome and Padua. Based on research in central and local academic archives and on an analysis of the secondary literature, the gestation phase of the 4-year degree course in Psychology, the progressive establishment of the Psychology Departments, and the 5-year reform of the courses up to the birth of the first Faculty of Psychology at an Italian university are reconstructed. The aim of this article is to propose a well-founded discontinuist historiographical reading of the process of sedimentation of psychological experimentation that, after being born in the Faculty of Sciences and later transferring to the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, also led to important developments in the Faculty of Education, with the recognition of an autonomous academic space of scientific discipline with a degree course, departments and finally the Faculty of Psychology.