Patient Tales - 9781570037610

Patient Tales. Berkenkotter (writing studies, University of Minnesota) studies the development of individual case histories of the mentally ill from their inception in the 1790's to the present through the perspective of narrative. She notes how the descriptions by medical professionals of patients, including direct quotes from them, used narrative devices that reflected their opinions of the case. Over the past two hundred years changing attitudes toward mental illness, including statutes requiring case studies in order to prevent abuses in facilities, created changes in the structure and content of the reports. The greatest use of subjective narrative came in the twentieth century with Freudian analysis. However, even today, when psychiatry is a recognized medical discipline using chemical and brain-function tests, Berkenkotter still discovered, through interviews with practitioners, that the old forms of rhetoric do surface. An interesting cross-disciplinary study. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)