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Conflicting models of selfhood have become central to debates over modern medicine. Yet we still lack a clear historical account of how this psychological sensibility came to be established. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880–1970 will remedy this situation by demonstrating that there is nothing inevitable about the current connection between health, identity and personal history. It traces the changing conception of the psyche in Britain over the last two centuries and it demonstrates how these changes were rooted in transformed patterns of medical care. The shifts from private medicine through to National Insurance and the National Health Service fostered different kinds of relationship between doctor and patient and different understandings of psychological distress. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880–1970 examines these transformations and, in so doing, provides new critical insights into our modern sense of identity and changing notions of health that will be of great value to anyone interested in the modern history of British medicine.

How can historians make sense of visions, hauntings and demonic possession? Do miraculous events have any place in a world governed by cause and effect? In Resisting history, Rhodri Hayward examines the cumulative attempts of theologians, historians and psychologists to create a consistent and rational narrative capable of containing the inexplicable. This lucid and provocative account argues that the psychological theories we routinely use to make sense of supernatural experience were born out of struggles between popular mystics and conservative authorities. Hayward’s lively analysis of the Victorian disciplines of Christology, psychology and psychical research reveals how our modern concept of the subconscious was developed as a tool for policing religious inspiration. He concludes his argument with a vivid study of the Welsh Revival of 1904-5, in which the attempt of thousands of converts to cast off their everyday identity was diffused and defeated using the language of the new psychology. By revealing the politics inherent in such language, Hayward raises questions about its deployment in the work of today’s historians.Written in a clear and accessible style, Resisting history provides a fresh and entertaining perspective for anyone interested in questioning the concepts that underlie historical writing and psychological thought today.

How can historians make sense of visions, hauntings and demonic possession? Do miraculous events have any place in a world governed by cause and effect? In Resisting history, Rhodri Hayward examines the cumulative attempts of theologians, historians and psychologists to create a consistent and rational narrative capable of containing the inexplicable. This lucid and provocative account argues that the psychological theories we routinely use to make sense of supernatural experience were born out of struggles between popular mystics and conservative authorities. Hayward’s lively analysis of the Victorian disciplines of Christology, psychology and psychical research reveals how our modern concept of the subconscious was developed as a tool for policing religious inspiration. He concludes his argument with a vivid study of the Welsh Revival of 1904-5, in which the attempt of thousands of converts to cast off their everyday identity was diffused and defeated using the language of the new psychology. By revealing the politics inherent in such language, Hayward raises questions about its deployment in the work of today’s historians. Written in a clear and accessible style, Resisting history provides a fresh and entertaining perspective for anyone interested in questioning the concepts that underlie historical writing and psychological thought today.

The idea of a conflict between demonology and psychiatry has been a foundational myth in the history of medicine. Nineteenth-century alienists such as J.-M. Charcot and Henry Maudsley developed critiques of supernatural phenomena in an attempt to pathologize religious experience. Modern historians have reanalyzed these critiques, representing them as strategies in medical professionalization. These accounts all maintain an oddly bifurcated approach to the perceived conflict, treating demonology as a passive and unchanging set of practices, while medicine is depicted as an active and aggressive agent. An examination of early twentieth-century demonological literature reveals a very different story. Fundamentalists and Pentecostalists engaged with the problems of conversion and possession, developing sophisticated models of the normal and the pathological in spiritual experience. Their writings drew upon medical and psychiatric sources ranging widely from Pastorian germ theory to Jacksonian neurology. This article explores the points of contact between the medical and demonological communities in order to demonstrate the contested nature of biomedical innovation.

Emotions maintain an ambivalent position in the economy of science. In contemporary debates they are variously seen as hardwired biological responses, cultural artifacts, or uneasy mixtures of the two. At the same time, there is a tension between the approaches to emotion developed in modern psychotherapies and in the history of science. While historians see the successful ascription of affective states to individuals and populations as a social and technical achievement, the psychodynamic practitioner treats these enduring associations as pathological accidents that need to be overcome. This short essay uses the career of the Glaswegian public health investigator James L. Halliday to examine how debates over the ontological status of the emotions and their durability allow them to travel between individual identity and political economy, making possible new kinds of psychological intervention.

In the early 1940s, the term was used on three fronts: to describe the psychological evaluation of military recruits; the political vetting of refugees and displaced persons; and mass medical examination of populations to identify preclinical conditions and contagious diseases.

Writing the recent history of mental health services requires a conscious departure from the historiographical tropes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have emphasised the experience of those identified (and legally defined) as lunatics and the social, cultural, political, medical and institutional context of their treatment. A historical narrative structured around rights (to health and liberty) is now complicated by the rise of new organising categories such as ‘costs’, ‘risks’, ‘needs’ and ‘values’. This paper, drawing on insights from a series of witness seminars attended by historians, clinicians and policymakers, proposes a programme of research to place modern mental health services in England and Wales in a richer historical context. Historians should recognise the fragmentation of the concepts of mental illness and mental health need, acknowledge the relationship between critiques of psychiatry and developments in other intellectual spheres, place the experience of the service user in the context of wider socio-economic and political change, understand the impacts of the social perception of ‘risk’ and of moral panic on mental health policy, relate the politics of mental health policy and resources to the general determinants of institutional change in British central and local government, and explore the sociological and institutional complexity of the evolving mental health professions and their relationships with each other and with their clients. While this is no small challenge, it is perhaps the only way to avoid the perpetuation of ‘single-issue mythologies’ in describing and accounting for change.

The idea that the body's response to environmental conditions might have long-term consequences had been proposed by William Osier (1849-1919). In 1934, Walter B Cannon (1871-1945) provided experimental evidence of this process when he showed the increased production of adrenalin in animals subject to stresses. Selye's genius, and his claim to be the inventor of the idea of stress, lay in his unique combination of laboratory investigation and popular exposition. His demonstration of a non-specific reaction of the body to external strains, resulting in disorders such as cardiac arrhythmia, was popular with the public and medical profession. In Selye's formulation, stress had become an unfortunate aspect of ourselves.