Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale." The process of medicalization, the concept of "madness" and the "history of psychiatry" as the subject of critical historical reflection over the last half century
2022
Abstract
The paper focuses on the reflection of the concept of medicalization and especially the related concepts of "history of madness" and "history of psychiatry" in the context of sociology of medicine, historiography and psychiatry itself in the last fifty years. In this paper we look at the changing concept of medicalization and consider what these critical histories of medicine and psychiatry bring to historians and historiographers and what challenges they also bring to historical scholarship in general, especially in understanding "modern" society in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.