Scull’s Madhouse gives a meticulously researched account of the actions of Dr Henry Cotton, a psychiatrist working in the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton in the early 20th century. Cotton believed that mental illness resulted from undetected infection in various parts of the body, and with the aim of eradicating said infections, he and his team operated on hundreds of patients, with significant rates of resulting morbidity and mortality. This article gives a summary of Professor Scull’s book, as well as a series of learning points from the book that can be used to guide reflective practice.

Alexander Crichton’s Inquiry (1798) was one of the first systematic English-language works on mental disorder. Although a general physician rather than a specialist, Crichton sought to explain how emotions, attention and the nervous system interacted to produce disturbance. His description of inattention is now regarded as the earliest English medical account of what we would call an attention disorder. He drew extensively on German case reports, vivid accounts of melancholy, delusion and violence. He highlighted how delusion could coexist with calm, purposeful behaviour, influencing both medical and legal views of responsibility. Modern historians see Crichton as a synthesiser rather than an originator, but his Inquiry remains an ambitious attempt to ground the study of mental disorder in physiology, observation and compassion.

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman was published in 1992. This article explores its relevance and legacy for today in the trauma field, particularly with the new ICD-11 diagnosis of complex post-traumatic disorder.

Published in 1913, General Psychopathology blends philosophy, rigorous conceptual analysis and detailed clinical examples. Jaspers makes the case that psychopathology requires two different methods (explaining and understanding) to address the predicament of the subjective nature of experience and what it was to be human. Key contributions from General Psychopathology to psychiatry include the conceptual framework for delusions, the issue of somatic prejudice, empathy as the key tool at our disposal in thinking about another person’s subjectivity, and the whole versus the part (gestalt). Jaspers was a proponent of the existential school of philosophy, which is evident throughout the work.

Roger Smith’s Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials traced how Victorian Britain defined legal insanity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Smith demonstrated how determinations of criminal responsibility were shaped by more than legal reasoning alone, with verdicts also influenced by professional ambition among expert witness groups often with divergent medical opinions, in addition to broader factors such as social class, gender and evolving moral values. Given its rigour and societal insights, it represents a landmark achievement in the field.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of bipolar disorder written by a clinical psychologist, professor of psychiatry and mood-disorders researcher. In this text, Jamison publicly described her own experience of mania, depression, psychosis, suicidality and lithium. We believe that this book remains a useful training text in psychiatry for three core reasons: what it reveals about treatment refusal, about professional stigma attached to psychiatric illness within medicine, and about the things that syndromic diagnosis can miss. Read critically, An Unquiet Mind remains helpful for thinking about ambivalence, clinician stigma, shared decision-making, and the limits of diagnosis without abandoning clinical precision.

Experiences in Groups is a revolutionary text in the understanding and analysis of group dynamics which remains highly relevant to mental health practice today. This article considers its key themes as well as its development in the context of Wilfred Bion’s work as a doctor and a psychoanalyst.

The Autistic Spectrum, published almost 30 years ago, remains an important text for all those who work with autistic individuals. This brief article highlights the significant contribution of Lorna Wing to how we view autism, including the observation that many of the issues being highlighted today regarding the appropriate management of autistic individuals are not new and can be found in the thoughts of Dr Wing.

This is the first of a series of articles on key works in psychiatry that should not be forgotten. Many were published before our current generation of psychiatrists had easy access to them, but they need recall. It is my strong belief that originality of thought only occurs in youth. Robert Kendell's book The Role of Diagnosis in Psychiatry (1975) illustrates this perfectly.

This article reviews the seminal work of Jaak Panksepp: Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. It outlines the basis of his theory of Basic Emotional Command Systems as common to all mammals and goes on to specify some of the key fields that have grown out of his research.

Lunatic Asylums, published 130 years ago, is a fascinating insight into how these institutions were managed in the late Victorian era. This brief article considers what it reveals about the zeitgeist of the time and the book's author, the remarkable Charles Mercier.

In A Plea for the Insane (1918), Lionel Weatherly outlined the inadequacies of the Lunacy Act 1890 and of asylum care in England and Wales, and proposed solutions and ways to bring about improvements. It took courage to persist, but Weatherly was undeterred by controversy or criticism. This article reflects on his book and its context and timing at the end of the First World War, and considers whether we may be inspired to confront current healthcare crises with the same sort of passion and fervour as he did.

Essays on Partial Derangement of the Mind in Supposed Connection with Religion, written amidst the illness of its author almost two centuries ago, was the little-known work of a distinguished physician. Seeking to rebut the argument that religion is causative of ‘derangement of the mind’ it takes a surprisingly biological view of such conditions while, at the same time, affirming the importance of faith, hope and love in human well-being. Despite its limitations, it makes observations that remain relevant to debates about religion and psychiatry today.

Stengel, Cook and Kreeger's Attempted Suicide is the most sustained early attempt to draw out the social setting of an attempt at suicide. It is part of a real flourishing of social psychiatry in the UK and reinforces a productive model for collaboration between research psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers in the 1950s and 1960s. The sheer amount of work required for a robust social setting, charting the social repercussions for an attempt at suicide, is laid bare in this text.

The scientific study of human sexuality is now accepted as mainstream practice but early researchers in the field often attracted considerable criticism. Masters and Johnson were pioneers in observing and describing normal sexual function and consequently they provided unique insights into helping to understand sexual dysfunction. Their contribution to describing the physiological process of sexual response alongside potential psychological factors resulting in and maintaining sexual dysfunction is widely acknowledged. Their work continues to influence contemporary sexual medicine and psychosexual therapeutic practice.

The Bell Jar (1963) is a semi-autobiographical novel written by the confessional poet, novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). It has been often cited as a recommended reading within the medical humanities, because of its powerful description of depression and the understanding-by-experience of the related psychiatric treatments. This brief article, primarily directed at the clinically oriented reader, presents a selection of excerpts from The Bell Jar to illustrate the main diagnostic features of clinical depression and the vital role of therapeutic relationship quality in hindering or facilitating treatment outcomes and recovery.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals has been considered Charles Darwin's forgotten masterpiece and is his only book on psychology. It is also the first ever systematic application of Darwinian theory to the expression of emotions and has been considered by some to be the foundational text of evolutionary psychology. This article explores some key concepts in the book and gives reasons why both psychiatry and psychology can benefit greatly from becoming better acquainted with this work.

Kushner's monograph (published in 2000) explores clinicians’ developing understanding of a syndrome first described 200 years ago. This article highlights changing concepts of the disorder, its aetiology and treatment over its long history, as described by Kushner, and considers the current differential diagnosis of DSM-5 ‘Tourette's disorder’. It points out Kushner's astute observation that the clinical syndrome originally described by Itard and Gilles de la Tourette as ‘maladie des tics’ is not what is defined in the 21st century as Tourette syndrome.

The book Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (1968) is widely acclaimed as the masterwork of Joseph Wolpe, a great pioneer in the development of behavioural therapy, and is considered one of the most influential books in the history of clinical psychology. In this article, a brief biography of Wolpe is followed by a critical review of the book that illustrates his major contributions to the evolution of cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) as the most empirically supported model of psychotherapy.

Although published over 30 years ago, Motor Disorder in Psychiatry remains a thought-provoking consideration of motor disorder in the context of the psychiatric patients. Rogers hypothesises a common aetiology of motor disorder regardless of a predominating psychiatric or neurological presentation, arguing that the former demands further scrutiny within a neurological/neuropsychiatric framework.