Volume 47, Number 1 · January 20, 2000
On the Road
By Rosemary Dinnage
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses
by Ian Hacking
University Press of Virginia, 239 pp., $27.95
As the title declares, this is a book about reality. Or, more accurately, 'reality.' Author of an impressive study of multiple personality (Rewriting the Soul, 1995), Professor Hacking here narrows down his interest in the extraordinary changeableness of mental symptoms to one circumscribed instance: a psychiatric epidemic of 'hysterical fugues'—cases of people who suddenly left home, suffered from amnesia, and took on a new identity, at least for a while. Diagnoses of these cases began to be reported around 1886 and continued, says Hacking, for twenty-two years—then more or less disappeared.
Review, 3790 words
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