History of forensic psychiatry.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this review is to highlight recent English-language literature in the history of psychiatry, with a special emphasis on the history of forensic psychiatry. It considers publications from 2008 and early 2009, as well as a few important older works that have not yet been reviewed in these pages.


RESULTS
The history of forensic psychiatry is a mixtum compositum that challenges historians to reassess their stock narratives in many different ways. Recent studies have demonstrated that the traditional research paradigms of modernization, medicalization, and professionalization fail adequately to capture the historical complexity and contingency of forensic practices and experiences. These deficits have prompted historians to set out in search of new, more hybrid historiographic strategies. Accordingly, their research is turning increasingly to the thresholds of forensic psychiatry where they are exploring how a heterogeneous array of concepts, images, and materials are exchanged and circulated in ways that shape the historical disposition of forensic psychiatry.


CONCLUSIONS
This review assesses three historiographic domains in which historians have traditionally situated forensic psychiatry. It argues that we need to be cognizant of these different domains and to recognize that enhancing our historical understanding will require us to reflect more carefully on the relationship between them.
Engstrom
Eric J
EJ
Department of History, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. engstroe@geschichte.hu-berlin.de
D005555:Forensic Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans