Andrew Gaedtke

Bio

Andrew Gaedtke is a Conrad Humanities Scholar and an associate professor of English and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and has published articles in the fields of modern and contemporary literature, disability studies, medical humanities, and the cultural history of the mind sciences.

Contributions

Psychiatry’s Strange Objects: Modernism and the Language-Games of Diagnosis

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The era of modernism was also the moment when psychiatry became modern—at least this is the story that psychiatry has often told about itself. With the development of new nosological taxonomies, severe forms of mental illness were identified, described, and organized into distinct categories such as manic depression and dementia praecox (later schizophrenia) by psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler. These systems became the foundations for the diagnostic vocabulary of contemporary...

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diagnosis psychiatry