Description

Isaac Wright Blackburn was pathologist to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, and this is the working manual he wrote for the men who would open the bodies. It is a precise, unsentimental document: how to remove and weigh a brain, how to harden and section it, what to record and in what order. Behind the procedure lies the great conviction of nineteenth-century psychiatry — that madness was a disease of the organ, and that the organ, properly examined, would show it. It rarely did. The manual is therefore two things at once: a competent handbook of pathological technique, and evidence of how a whole discipline expected to find its answers.