The Late Bloom of the "Black Sheep" of Medicine: Psychiatry

Once called "the black sheep of medicine," psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But its path to legitimacy has not always been smooth. In Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, Jeffrey Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of "shrinks" to its late blooming maturity.