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E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller. The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Menial illness from 1750 to the Present. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. xiv + 416 pp. Tables, graphs. $28.00 (0-8135-3003-2).
Thirty years ago an American psychiatrist, E. Fuller Torrey, wrote a researcli paper suggesting that the current rates of functional psychosis (schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness) were not transhistorically constant, but rather a psychiatric side effect of advanced industrialization. For Torrey, government statistics over the previous two hundred years demonstrated a constant increase in the rates of the most severe mental disorders. Positing that these functional psychoses were "recent" diseases, he proceeded to identify possible biological culprits, including an as-yet-undetected virus circulating in industrial cities since the early nineteenth century. Apparently, the paper was rejected by everyjournal to which it was sent. The Invisible Plague is the author's book-length rebuttal to the skeptics who dismissed so long ago his "recent disease" hypothesis. Although contemporaries were divided over whether this reported increase was "apparent" or "real," most present-day scholars have eschewed any general acceptance of the possible rise in insanity, relegating it to cultural anxieties of Victorians and Edwardians worried about mental and physical degeneration. Torrey and Judy Miller, by contrast, believe this disregard to be unwarranted. We are, they believe, living amid an invisible plague-invisible because we refuse to acknowledge it.
Torrey and Miller dismiss one by one the series of explanations given by generations of historians and psychiatrists to the effect that there is no compelling evidence to conclude that insanity has been on...