Ocean State Libraries

"It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer--brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age...

Americans want to be humane toward the mentally ill, yet we have always been divided about what is best for them and for society. Now, the foremost historian of the care of the mentally ill compellingly recounts our various attempts to solve this ever-present dilemma. In the first comprehensive one-volume history of the treatment of the mentally ill, Gerald Grob begins with colonial America, when families and local communities accepted responsibility...

A biography of the nineteenth-century reformer who devoted much of her life to improving the treatment of the mentally ill in the United States.

A biography of the nineteenth-century reformer who devoted much of her life to improving the treatment of the mentally ill in the United States.

"Asylum Ways of Seeing is a social history of psychiatric patient cultures in the twentieth-century United States. Heather Murray's angle is less institutional than cultural and intellectual. Rather than focusing, like so many books in the history of medicine, on the rise of the institution and its changing treatments over time, Murray attempts something much more challenging, especially in this age of patient confidentiality: she seeks to understand...