David Robertson // It was a ‘bright May morning’ in California in 1953 when the British author Aldous Huxley swallowed 400 milligrams of the hallucinogen mescaline and ‘sat down to wait for the results.’ Thirty minutes later Huxley ‘became aware of a slow dance of golden lights’ and, soon after, ‘sumptuous red surfaces swelling and…
Author: David Robertson
Historian of psychiatry, immunology, epidemiology, (post)colonialism, and anthropology.
Images of an Imagined Future: Photographing Deinstitutionalization in a Developing World
David Robertson // In the 1950s, the World Health Organization (WHO) engaged in a global effort to improve the treatment of institutionalized psychiatric patients. In the newly coined “developing nations” this support tended to target those in which a sizeable psychiatric infrastructure was already in place, including postcolonial nations like India and the Philippines. A…
Weaving the Tapestry of the History of Psychiatry: Anne Harrington’s ‘Mind Fixers’
David Robertson // Over the last twenty years, considerable scholarly contributions have been made to the history of psychiatry. We have had historical analyses of the concept of “nerves” and “neurasthenia,” of “trauma” and the emergence of diagnoses such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.[1] Historians have examined the material settings of neuropsychiatric efforts to localize brain…
A New History of Hereditary Science: ‘Genetics in the Madhouse’
David Robertson // Aided by the rapid growth of publicly available big data and internet search engines, genealogy tracing has become a hugely popular activity. But its origins are not so technologically glamorous: as historian Theodore Porter puts it, ‘The science of human heredity arose first amid the moans, stench, and unruly despair of mostly…
Three ‘Cs’ of Global Health’s Avalanche of Numbers
David Robertson // ‘Suicide rate up 33%’ reads a recent news headline; ‘dementia skyrocketed by 117% over just 26 years’, reads another.[1] Internationally, health media today indicates a growing reliance on the quantitative representation of health findings, outcomes, and interventions in a display of what philosopher of science Ian Hacking once described, referring to the…
Databases, Diagnoses, and the History of Psychiatry
David Robertson // Like other fields of medicine, psychiatry depends upon “information infrastructures” in order to delineate different mental disorders. Such infrastructures include the personnel, tools, systems, and networks essential for the day-to-day collection of large quantities of data. Attending to the historical transformation of information infrastructures in psychiatry calls on the historian to think…