All Posts Tagged With: "Benjamin Rush"
Mental Illness as Brain Disease: A Brief History Lesson
A 1999 White House Conference on Mental Health concluded: “Research in the last decade proves that mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain.” President William Clinton was more specific: “Mental illness can be accurately diagnosed, successfully treated, just as physical illness.” Persons who reject the view that mental illnesses are physical diseases are dismissed [...]
1May2006 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedBenjamin Rush and "Medical Marijuana"
Last November the U.S. Supreme Court considered the appeal in Ashcroft v. Raich, regarding approval for so-called medical marijuana, that is, for marijuana by prescription. Hearing the case, Justice Stephen Breyer stated: “Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum.” This is a Hobson’s choice: in either case, the individual is denied free access [...]
1Mar2005 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedPrimum Nocere
Although the phrase “First, Do No Harm” is not in the Hippocratic Oath, in the opinion of many scholars Hippocrates did originate it. In his book, Epidemics, he wrote: “As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.” This principle, usually expressed in its Latin translation, Primum [...]
1Dec2004 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedMental Illness: Psychiatry’s Phlogiston
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” —Gilbert K. Chesterton In physics the same laws are used to explain why airplanes fly and why they crash. In medicine the same principles are used to explain why people live and [...]
1Nov2001 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedWhose Kids Are They?
David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer (Free Press). This article is adapted from his foreword to the new edition of The Twelve-Year Sentence: Radical Views of Compulsory Schooling edited by William F. Rickenbacker (Fox and Wilkes). Rereading The Twelve-Year Sentence a quarter-century after it was [...]
1Oct1998 | David Boaz | 1 comment | Continued-
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