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How did the affliction we now know as insanity move from a religious phenomenon to a medical one? How did social class, gender, and ethnicity affect the experience of mental trauma and the way psychiatrists diagnosed and treated patients? In answering these questions, this important volume mines the rich and unusually detailed records of one of Germany's first modern insane asylums, the Eberbach Asylum in the duchy of Nassau. It is a book on the historical relationship between madness and modernity that both builds upon and challenges Michel Foucault's landmark work on this topic, a bold study that gives generous consideration to madness from the patient's perspective while also shedding new light on sexuality, politics, and antisemitism in nineteenth-century Germany. Drawing on the case records of several hundred asylum patients, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness reconstructs the encounters of state officials and medical practitioners with peasant madness and deviancy during a transitional period in the history of both Germany and psychiatry. As author Ann Goldberg explains, this era witnessed the establishment of psychiatry as a legitimate medical specialty during a time of social upheaval, as Germany underwent the shift toward a capitalist order and the modern state. Focusing on such "illnesses" as religious madness, nymphomania, and masturbatory insanity, as well as the construct of Jewishness, she probes the daily encounters in which psychiatric categories were applied, experienced, and resisted within the settings of family, village, and insane asylum. The book is a model of microhistory, breaking new ground in the historiography of psychiatry as it synthetically applies approaches from "the history of everyday life," anthropology, poststructuralism, and feminist studies. In contrast to earlier, anecdotal studies of "the asylum patient," Goldberg employs diagnostic patterns to illuminate the ways in which madness--both in psychiatric practice and in the experience of patients--was structured by gender, class, and "race." She thus examines both the social basis of rural mental trauma in the Vormärz and the political and medical practices that sought to refashion this experience. This study sheds light on a range of issues concerning gender, religion, class relations, ethnicity, and state-building. It will appeal to students and scholars of a number of disciplines.

On October 29th 1953 in Lund, Sweden, Inge Edler, cardiologist, and Hellmuth Hertz, physicist, performed the first successful Ultrasoundcardiogram (UCG), later renamed Echocardiogram. A few weeks later, on December 16th, the neurosurgeon Lars Leksell diagnosed an intracranial bleeding in a 16-month-old boy using the same equipment, and Echoencephalography was born. The Lundensian obstetrician Bertil Sunden was in 1962 able to take the first ultrasound picture of twins in pregnancy. These three world premieres at the Lund University were the foundation for the tremendous development of diagnostic ultrasound. Before it is too late, the history in Lund will be told, and with this history as background Ultrasound in Clinical Diagnosis brings together some of the leading ultrasound experts of today to bring us up to date with the use of ultrasound in its ever-increasing importance for diagnosis in many areas of medicine. Peter wells writes in his Foreword that "this fascinating book serves more than one purpose: it is an historical record of the pioneering developments in clinical ultrasonic diagnosis that took place in Lund... what we now recognise as one of the greatest medical innovations of the twentieth century... Besides its historical content, this book also includes scholarly reviews of the state-of-art in adult and paediatric cardiology, obstetrics and gynaecology, vascular disease in several countries and, primarily from technical perspective, radiology, as well as an overview of contrast studies". Other chapters describe the development in ophthalmology and oto-rhino-laryngology as well as the industrial development of ultrasound equipment. This book will be valuable and interesting to those who are interested in the development of ultrasound diagnosis in medicine.