Monthly Archives: August 2016

The theme for this section of podcasts is the shifting balance between organic or somatic causes and mental or psychological ones. As new discoveries were made, physicians, scientists, and others… Read more »

Early modern Europe saw an unprecedented craze for hunting, prosecuting, and executing witches, tens of thousands of whom were burned. It was widely believed witches could manipulate evil forces to… Read more »

This week’s podcast explores the ways in which mental illness has been identified and described. The popular, vernacular, or ‘street’ vocabulary of mental dysfunction has always been remarkably rich, perhaps… Read more »

One of the themes of these podcasts is that the boundaries between medicine and other disciplines in the past were much less clear cut than nowadays and the way knowledge… Read more »

In this block of podcasts I’m going to look again at the language used to describe mental problems, the ways lay and professional people identified them in the past, and… Read more »