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Professor Jan Goldstein visits CHM

The Centre for the History of Medicine is pleased to have hosted Jan Goldstein, Professor of History at the University of Chicago and co-editor of the Journal of Modern History, at the University of Warwick.

Professor Goldstein works on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, especially France, from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Her books include Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (CUP 1987), and she has two new books due out soon.

The first is The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Harvard University Press, spring 2005). This book traces a politics of selfhood in France by examining the competition among three psychological theories that all made bids for institutionalization in the French state educational system: sensationalism, phrenology, and the philosophical psychology of Victor Cousin.

A second new book will follow in the next year or so: a study (and English translation) of a manuscript case history of "hysteria complicated by ecstasy" in a Savoyard peasant girl in the 1820s.

While at Warwick Professor Goldstein participated in two events, each related to her forthcoming publications: a reading lunch was held on Monday, 25 April, at which a chapter from The Post-Revolutionary Self was discussed; and a lecture entitled ‘’Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy’: Freud, Foucault, and the Case of an Early Nineteenth-Century Savoyard Peasant Girl,’ was held Tuesday, 26 April.