Edward Shorter

Edward Shorter Ph.D., is a social historian of medicine, clinical scientist, and professor at the University of Toronto. Shorter has published widely in this field, including the histories of obstetrics and gynecology (Women’s Bodies), the doctor-patient relationship (Doctors and Their Patients), psychosomatic illness (From Paralysis to Fatigue), and sexuality (Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire). In 1991 he was appointed to the Faculty of Medicine as the Jason A. Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine. Since then he has emerged as an internationally recognized historian of psychiatry and the author of numerous books on the evolution of the discipline, including A History of Psychiatry (1997); A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry (2005); and Before Prozac (2009). Dr. Shorter's most recent work is "How Everyone Became Depressed: the Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown" (Oxford, 2013)

Articles by this Author

How Prozac Slew Freud, September 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 5

In the past hundred years psychiatry has come full circle: Psychoanalysis lost; medicine won

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