Since its publication in 1989, Console and Classify has become a classic work in the history of science and in French intellectual history. Now with a new afterword, this much-cited and much-discussed book gives readers the chance to revisit the rise of psychiatry in nineteenth-century France, the shape it took and why, and its importance both then and in contemporary society.
Goldstein has raised our understanding of the politics of psychiatric professionalization on to a new plane. –Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement
[A]n historiographical tour de force, quite simply the most insightful work on the subject in English or any other language… . [A] work of distinctive originality… . It is written with lucidity and elegance, even a certain confident scholarly panache, that make it a pleasure to read. –Toby Gelfand, Social History
Exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and persuasively argued, Console and Classify is an excellent example of the … sociologically informed intellectual history, stimulated by Kuhn and Foucault. –Robert Alun Jones, American Journal of Sociology