Book Review

摘要

, the first part of a broader inquiry into Americanmedical history and culture, focuses on the immediate postwar period and takes the analysis asfar as the 1970s. The second part of this study, which is currently in development, willcentre on the final three decades of the twentieth century, and could conceivably extend intothe twenty-first century. Martin Halliwell, the book’s author, is Professor of AmericanStudies at Leicester University and an international authority on postwar US culture. Inrecent times, he has written about and . Yet, in this diverse, dynamic andcomplicated volume, he marshals a remarkable range of sources, from to , as a means to examine medicine andculture or, as he frames it, ‘discourses of illness, health and therapy as they evolved in the25 years following World War II’. He does so ‘by combining discussions of subjects that rangefrom national politics, public reports, and health care debates’ with ‘culture and the media’.A significant highlight of the book is its emphasis on race and mental health. Of course, itis well known that race and insanity have a long, variegated and troubled past in the UnitedStates, and such authors as Jonathan Metzl and Matthew Gambino have sought to locate blackswithin asylum history and expose how race is written into definitions of mental illness. Yet,here Halliwell, to his credit, enhances the understanding of the relationship between AfricanAmerican mental health and institutional psychiatry by viewing the negotiation through thelens of culture. Using such films as and , as well as novels, including Richard Wright’s and James Baldwin’s , Halliwell recogniseshow mental health services have been shaped by and delivered in a racially charged milieu.While doctors’ files and patient records are not used here, this absence does not markedlydetract from Halliwell’s cultural analysis.