'Shattered Nerves' - Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England

Janet Oppenheim''s book explores an illness that figures in nearly every volume of Victorian autobiography, memoirs, diaries, letters, and more than a few novels. Oppenheim uses the letters, diaries, and autobiographies of men and women who suffered breakdowns, examines medical archives, published scientific sources, and contemporary fiction, in which the `nervous type'' was so familiar as to border on caricature. Shattered Nerves places a puzzling medical problem in its full social, cultural, and intellectual context.