Console and Classify

Since its publication in 1989, "Console and Classify" has become a classic work in the history of science and in French intellectual history. Now with a new afterword, this much-cited and much-discussed book gives readers the chance to revisit the rise of psychiatry in nineteenth-century France, the shape it took and why, and its importance both then and in contemporary society. "Goldstein has raised our understanding of the politics of psychiatric professionalization on to a new plane."--Roy Porter, "Times Higher Education Supplement" "[A]n historiographical tour de force, quite simply the most insightful work on the subject in English or any other language. . . . [A] work of distinctive originality. . . . It is written with lucidity and elegance, even a certain confident scholarly panache, that make it a pleasure to read."--Toby Gelfand, "Social History" "Exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and persuasively argued, "Console and Classify" is an excellent example of the . . . sociologically informed intellectual history, stimulated by Kuhn and Foucault."--Robert Alun Jones, "American Journal of Sociology"