Animal Madness: A Natural History of Disorder by Laurel Braitman Bachelor of Arts Cornell University, 2001 MASHUSi-N^iiSsTYfffE OF TECHNOLOGY
OEC 6
2013
O164113S
Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society
at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology September 2013
© 2013 Laurel Braitman. All Rights Reserved.
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any
medium now known or hereafter created. A
Signature of Author:
History, Anthr9pology, and Science, Technology and Society July 29, 2013 Certified by:
- V
Harriet Ritvo Arthur J. Conner Professor of History Thesis Supervisor Certified by:
David Jones A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine (Harvard University) Thesis Committee Member
Certified by:
Stefan Helmreich Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology Thesis Committee Member Accepted by:
Heather Paxson Associate Professor, Anthropology Director 9 raduate Studies, Histry, Anthropology, and STS Accepted by:
David Kaiser Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, STS Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics
Animal Madness: A Natural History of Disorder
By
Laurel S. Braitman
Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology and Society on September 4, 2013 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society
ABSTRACT
Beginning in the late 19th century, changing conceptions of relatedness between people
and other animals -- and animals' assumed capacities for, or susceptibilities to, mental or
emotional distress-- were influenced by debates over what it meant to be both human and sane in Britain and the United States. Through a historical, partly-ethnographic,
investigation of animal insanity in various times and places in the Anglo-American world
from the late I 9th century through the early 21st, I argue that identifying animal madness,
insanity, nervous disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias, depression, obsessive
compulsivities, suicidal behaviors and more, has not only served as a way of affixing meaning to puzzling animal acts, but has been used to denote borders (or lack thereof) between certain groups of humans and certain groups of animals. As with other divisions,
such as those hinging on race, gender, nationality or class, ideas surrounding which humans and which other animals could experience particular forms of insanity have been
used to justify certain forms of treatment (or mistreatment), to rationalize needs for confinement or freedom, or to determine what sorts of people and other creatures were deserving of rights and to what degree. I suggest that the history of attempts to identify certain emotional phenomena such as melancholy and suicidal behavior in horses and monkeys, to, more recently, obsessive-compulsivity in parrots and PTSD in military dogs, demonstrates that other animals have acted as mirrors and proxies for disordered Anglo-American minds for more than a century. Drawing upon archival sources, published literature in the fields of ethology, psychology, psychiatry,
psychopharmacology, and the veterinary sciences, as well as environmental history, history of medicine and animal studies, combined with interviews and participant observation, I argue that attempts to locate insanity, mental illness, dysfunction and "normalcy" among nonhumans has had wide-ranging effects on diagnostic and
therapeutic practices in humans and other animals alike in the United States and Britain.
Thesis Supervisor: Harriet Ritvo
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
... 5 -6
Introduction
... 3 5
Chapter 1. Mirrors and Proxies
... 3 6 -9 9
Chapter 2. Animal Pharm
... 10 0 -14 6
Chapter 3. Good Dog Bad Dog: Pathology and Therapy
... 14 7 -2 0 8
Chapter 4. Animal Suicide
... 2 0 9 -24 7 Conclusion ... 24 8-2 50 Appendices ... 2 5 1-2 54 Bibliography ... 2 5 5-2 8 8
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Harriet Ritvo. It was an honor to have worked together and I am grateful for her whole-hearted support, as well as her patience, guidance, insight, encouragement, and excellent example. I would also like to thank my committee members David Jones and Stefan Helmreich, who graciously offered years of advice, training, support, inspiration, kindness, critical feedback and friendship. Karen Gardner has been the administrative compass on the ship that is my graduate education, keeping me clear of the rocky shores. I am in her debt.
For fiscal, as well as intellectual support, I am grateful to the History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT, the National Science Foundation's IGERT Program on Emerging Technologies, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, the John S. Hennessey Fellowship for Environmental Studies, the MIT Presidential Fellowship and the History of Science Department at Harvard University.
Completion of this dissertation would have been impossible if not for the many scholars who have shared their experience, knowledge and support. I am grateful to Deborah Fitzgerald, Christine Walley, Nigel Rothfels, Donna Haraway, Etienne Benson, Merritt Roe Smith, Susan Silbey, Rosalind Williams, Leo Marx, Jean Jackson, David Kaiser, Anne McCants, Janet Browne, and Amitav Ghosh.
For literal and metaphorical housing and support I am grateful to Mabel Hodges and Craig Wilder of MIT's Department of History, Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil, Andi Sutton and Colin Wilkins, Ann Hatch, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Barbara Mathe and the archives and research library of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
For generously sharing their insights from the front lines of human-other-animal
relations, I am grateful to Mel Richardson, Jeannine Jackal, Phoebe Greene Linden, Toni Frohoff, Michael Mufson, Harry Prosen, Lori Marino, Diana Reiss, Nicole Cottam, Joseph LeDoux, Kate Browne, Jodi Frediani, Richard Lair, Gail O'Malley, Daniel Quagliozzi, Naomi Rose, Ann Southcombe, Cynthia Zarling, Ruth Samuels, Pam Schaller and the many other trainers, zookeepers, veterinarians, therapists, rehabilitators, behaviorists, ethologists, scientists, and volunteers whose accounts of nonhuman
emotional life helped inform this dissertation.
For research assistance and support I am grateful to the staff at the New York Zoological Society archive, the archive and research library at the American Museum of Natural History, the archive at the Freud Museum in London, the archive at the California Academy of Sciences, the Franklin Park Zoo, the Marine Mammal Center, the Performing Animal Welfare Society, the Milwaukee County Zoo, the MIT Library
system, Matthew Christensen, and Colin Wilkins.
For camaraderie, inspiration and joyful commiseration, I thank my fellow students and/or MIT collaborators, in particular, Jae Rhim Lee, Kelly Dobson, Meg Rotzel, Larissa
Harris, Rebecca Woods, Lisa Messeri, Etienne Benson, Michael Rossi, Orkideh Behrouzan, Shehkar Krishnan, Candis Callison, Ryan Shapiro, Michaela Thompson, Sophia Roosth, Sara Wylie, Jenny Leigh Smith, Anne Pollock and Nicholas Buchanan. For keeping me from becoming a mad animal myself, I thank my family (biological and otherwise): Jake and Alice Braitman, Lynn Braitman and Rob Moser, Caitlin Swaim, Rebecca Goodstein, Kathleen Henderson and Cal Peternell, Brooke Levasseur, Quinn Kanaly, Catherine and Travis Keeling, Leyla Abou-Samra, Christina Seely, Stefanie Warren, Auriga Martin, Maria Barrell, Andi Sutton, Colin Wilkins, Brad Simpson, Maria DeRyke and Rigo 23.
I am also grateful to my father, Howard Braitman, for making my teenage self get out of the car to "just go look at MIT because it's so incredible" even though I didn't want to. He was right.
Laurel Braitman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Introduction
British and American veterinarians, zoo keepers, natural historians, farmers, pet owners and other close animal observers over the course of the long 2 0th century frequently
recognized afflictions such as nostalgia, heartbreak, mortal homesickness and suicide, to, more recently, obsessive compulsivities, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression in many nonhuman animals they came across. As this dissertation suggests, the sorts of labels affixed to the furred, scaled or feathered bodies (and emotional states) of other animals, from dogs to donkeys, have frequently been linked to conceptions of mental health in the various British and American societies in which these animals find
themselves. Identifying madness, insanity, nervous disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias and more in other creatures, has not only served as a way of finding meaning in puzzling animal behaviors, but has also been used to denote borders (or lack thereof) between certain groups of humans and certain groups of animals in the minds of Anglo-Americans
interested in such distinctions.
Since the late 19th century, changing conceptions of relatedness between people and other animals -- and animals' various assumed capacities for, or susceptibilities to, mental or emotional distress-- were influenced by debates over what it meant to be both human and sane in Britain and the United States. As with other divisions-- such as those hinging on race, gender, nationality or class-- ideas surrounding which humans and which animals could experience particular forms of insanity were used to justify certain forms of treatment (or mistreatment), to rationalize needs for confinement or freedom, or to determine what sorts of people and other creatures were deserving of rights and to what
degree. This dissertation suggests that the history of attempts to identify certain
emotional phenomena such as melancholy and suicidal behavior in horses and monkeys, to, more recently, obsessive-compulsivity in parrots and PTSD in military dogs,
demonstrates that other animals have acted as mirrors of and proxies for "disordered" Anglo-American minds and have frequently been treated accordingly.
From the late 19t century, when pet-owners, zookeepers, psychologists, psychiatrists, animal behaviorists, animal rights activists, veterinarians and others explained puzzling animal behavior by way of analogy with human afflictions, they have often reified the existence of pathological behavior in multiple species. These transpecies identifications have unfurled within the disciplines of ethology, psychology, and psychiatry, the veterinary sciences, the psychopharmaceutical industry, the animal display and
petkeeping industries, communities devoted to animal welfare, and within the military. These identifications have had, I argue, wide-ranging effects on diagnostic and
therapeutic practices in humans and other animals alike in the United States and Britain.
Using the long 2 0th century as a broad backdrop, this dissertation historicizes a series of
British and American attempts to identify insanity, emotional distress, mental ill health and recovery in nonhuman animals-- from the zoos, circuses and city streets of the late
19th century to the zoos, sanctuaries, veterinary clinics and pet-owning homes of the 2 1
st--to argue that assignations of mental illness are powerful st--tools used st--to facilitate trans-species interactions (such as those between "misbehaving" dogs and their owners, mad elephants and their keepers, or veterinarians and their patients), bolster animal welfare
and ecological protection arguments, and attempt to define normalcy and normal
behaviors for both humans and nonhumans. The questions at the heart of this dissertation include, for example: how did the mad elephant of the 1890s become the sanctuary elephant of the early 2000s with PTSD? How did the heartbroken dog of the early 2 0th
century become today's canine with severe separation anxiety? And how did the melancholic gorilla of the 1920s become a contemporary ape with a mood disorder, a Prozac prescription and a human psychiatrist?
In an attempt to answer these questions, 1 offer a series of 2 0 th century Euro-American
flashpoints (bookended by two particularly productive periods in the history of animal insanity), placing assignations of animal emotional disorder or ill health into socio-historical context. This is not a progressive intellectual history; opinions over what constitutes abnormal animal emotional states or behaviors (and their treatment) has rarely represented consensus and the triggers for assignations of animal insanity have been various and sometimes conflicting. The flashpoints included here consist of sweeping sociological changes (such as late 19th century urbanization or the growing role of pets as intimates in American households), others are bounded historical events (such as World War 1) and still others are medical breakthroughs (such as the mid-2Oth-century
development of psychopharmaceutical drugs in Europe and America). I also point to shifts in popular attitudes-- such as changing ideas about nonhuman nature promulgated
by both early and late 2 0th century advocates for wildlife protections, or contemporary
Euro-American anxieties regarding anthropogenic climate change, environmental toxins and their relationship to mental health.
The dissertation is organized topically, by chapter, to reflect the non-linear nature of the subject of animal insanity itself. Additionally, because the various phenomena of animal emotional distress, mental illness or disorder, and therapeutics, has been noted across multiple disciplines and socio-historical contexts, and were recorded in many different forms (ie. newspaper accounts, diary entries, field notes, research publications, popular anecdotes), each chapter also contains a varied mixture of archival, ethnographic, and secondary source material. I toggle between these types of sources throughout the dissertation, referencing secondary sources where they exist, and creating narratives based upon primary sources and observation when the existing historical or otherwise
scholarly record falls short. Occasionally, anecdotes are reproduced here in nearly the same the form they were relayed to me by those with direct experience with the animals at hand and this is because I have determined the particular story both representative of others and germane to the topic at hand (see, for example, the account of Willie B. the Atlanta Zoo gorilla in Chapter Two or the tales of Gigi the gorilla and Brian the bonobo in Chapter Three). The historical narrative histories of John Daniel the gorilla, Monarch the grizzly bear, Lillian Powers the squirrel researcher have, for example, each been assembled, primarily from archival sources, while the contemporary accounts of visiting the Animal Behavior Clinic at Tufts University or the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Shelter rely on my own observation, combined with interviews, and their own published research. My accounts of captive and domestic animals on psychiatric medicines in Chapter Two, as well as the diagnostic processes performed in animal hospitals, clinics and shelters relies almost entirely on interviews,
personal observation and other primary source material because secondary sources frequently do not exist and popular media accounts fall short. I have chosen this patchwork approach because it is the only representative format to access the multiple narratives surrounding those individuals and institutions tasked with maintaining, judging and intervening in nonhuman mental health (some of whom publish journal articles in their respective and fields and many for whom such a thing would serve no useful purpose).
The research from which this dissertation is assembled consists of archival and secondary source materials drawn from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Society and elsewhere; more than forty interviews on the subject of mental health diagnoses, diagnosis-making, and therapeutics with veterinary practitioners, animal rehabilitators, psychiatrists, zookeepers, pet-owners and other individuals; three plus years of personal observation of humans and other animals
interacting at zoos, veterinary clinics, at sanctuaries, a shelter, a marine mammal hospital and pet hospitals; and published research within the animal studies, comparative
psychology, psychopharmaceutical, mental health, ecological, veterinary and ethological academic literatures (for more information on these interviews and observation, see Appendix A. Personal Correspondence, and Appendix B. Participant Observation).
This diversity of material, the long timescale, and interdisciplinary nature of the subject (plumbed by psychologists, veterinary, pharmaceutical, toxicological, and psychiatric researchers, as well as ethologists, ecologists and many independent animal rehabilitators,
zookeepers, shelter workers and others) necessitated a similarly interdisciplinary
narrative and analysis. The fields, disciplines, or sub-disciplines of environmental history, animal studies, anthropology of science, the history of psychiatry and treatment, as well
as the history of natural history (as it addresses constructed categories of difference) are the scaffolds upon which this dissertation is built. They offer the multiple methodologies
needed to address the topic of animal insanity and its treatment: archival research, interviews and observation. They also provide historical, sociopolitical and critical context, and offer a means of situating my dissertation within existing scholarship on human-other-animal relations (see the literature review), extending it to include this multifaceted history of insanity in nonhuman animals.
Flashpoints and Continuities
The first in a series of historical flashpoints undergirding the themes and analytical through-lines running through this dissertation is located in the late 19 century-with the work of natural historians such as Charles Darwin, Lauder Lindsay, George Romanes and others as they sought to shift preexisting distinctions between humanity and the rest of the natural world via the expression of emotions, and in the case of Lindsay in
particular, animal insanity. Recognizing insanity in other animals (as Darwin, Lindsay and Romanes did to varying degrees) represented the beginning of a change from viewing the human insane as morally compromised to understanding their afflictions as physical problems subject to medical intervention, a view that would come to
likely to be understood as shared among species. It was also a time in which fear of mad animals (whether or not they were rabid) transfixed the populace of America and Britain and reflected late 19th century human anxieties surrounding race, class, contamination
and other tensions.
The second in the series of historical flashpoints unfolds in the first decades of the 2 0th
century when afflictions such as homesickness, nostalgia, heartbreak and nervous
disorders were identified in many Euro-Americans and the animals they identified with. I concentrate on these diseases in particular as they were not only popular descriptors of human suffering at the time, but their widespread nature and relatively common
appearance in the United States in particular, were likely reactions to vast social changes--such as mass migration from rural areas to urban environs or from one region of the world to another, and the associated shifts in living conditions, forms of labor and family life; the loss of life of during World War I and the aftereffects of the war on survivors and their families; as well as the gaining popularity of the new Freudian psychoanalysis.
Two to three decades later, another pivotal point in the history of the conceptualization of insanity/sanity among humans and other animals was marked by the midcentury
development of psychopharmaceutical drugs in the United States and Europe.
Throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s, nonhuman animals served as psychopharmaceutical experimental subjects (helping researchers to stimulate, conceptualize and treat
disordered behavior in the lab) and were instrumental in the creation of antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs and other medications used to treat emotional disturbance. These
animals would arrive as test subjects but eventually, would be patients-- parallel participants in the formation of what would come to be seen as a drug industry for the maintenance of good mood and behavior (as opposed to means of eradicating disease) in Americans and other animals, a significant shift away from the shared rice gruels and
steam baths of the preceding century.'
By the 1970s, certain animals in the United States were also receiving these drugs as patients. The early use of such substances in pets and display animals was contiguous with earlier identifications of mental distress and abnormalities in other creatures (that
labeled them nostalgic or melancholic, for example) and sought to treat animals with the same sorts of therapies used for humans, but it was also evidence of a change. Drug therapy for both humans and other animals was applied in the context of evolving midcentury American gender roles, the chemical control of unwanted behavior or emotional expression, the increasing pathologization of emotional states, the growing popularity of family and child therapy, and the increasingly central presence of pets in family life in middle class America.
The penultimate period germane to the topic of animal insanity includes the flowering of the modern environmental awakenings of the 1960s and 70s. Newfound, and growing concern for nonhuman nature, inspired by texts like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, America's first "Earth Day" and other examples of renewed interest in nonhuman nature and its possible protections, inspired certain groups of people to identify more closely
It's important to note, however, that homeopathic, herbal and other home cures for pets were not replaced entirely by pharmaceutical treatments. There continues today to be a robust contingent of pet owners who use non-pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions for their pets, explained further in Chapter Three.
with the emotional lives of nonhuman animals, particularly dolphins and whales, and may have made American observers of their seemingly self-destructive behavior, more apt to identify stranding behavior, in particular, with human forms of self destruction, such as suicide.
Finally, the dissertation framing concludes with the present moment. Contemporary American attitudes towards mental health and therapeutic practices for other animals (captive, domestic and wild), as well as the industries that currently exist to cater to such concerns, are plumbed herein. I also include a selection of contemporary anxieties over possible links between mental health and environment, and potential anthropogenic ecological harms that may affect emotional life of both humans and other animals.
Dominant contemporary theories of disordered human minds and recovery in America (such as the idea that repeated exposure to stressors and/or trauma is likely to have long-term effects on physiological and emotional wellbeing, or that contradictory cues from caregivers can result in disordered behavior, or even the idea that replacing tranquilizers with antipsychotics might have marked increases on quality of life for patients lost in psychosis) have been influenced, from their inception, by observations and
experimentations upon other animals-from Harry Harlow's mid-20th-century investigations of developmental problems and depression in isolated lab primates to
many of the most significant psychopharmaceutical breakthroughs which took place in the bodies (and minds) of dogs, monkeys, rats and rabbits.
And yet, nonhuman animals were not merely experimental bodies upon which the history of mental health research was enacted. Many pets and zoo animals (and the occasional
food animal who is treated in order to be more productive, such as hens given stimulants to increase laying and depressants to relax them for sleep) have been considered mental
health patients in their own right. Others-- used for entertainment purposes in zoos or circuses, domestic animals who belong to no one (such as feral urban dogs), as well as certain populations of wildlife-- have also been seen to be suffering from afflictions that remind people of madness (both in the context of rabies and not), insanity, melancholy, hysteria, nostalgia, homesickness, suicidal tendencies, depression, compulsion, obsession, self-harm, various mood disorders, phobias and more.
The idea, for example, that other animals could be insane in ways similar to humans helped support Charles Darwin's argument that humans were different from other animals only by degree. One hundred and fifty years later, when psychiatrists treat depression in zoo gorillas for example, or veterinarians and pet owners dose anxious dogs with Xanax, they are engaging in a project not so different than Darwin's, though for entirely different purposes. Contemporary pharmaceutical companies, for example, have a vested, financial interest in certain humans (i.e. those that can afford to purchase pharmaceuticals) viewing their dogs and cats as subject to emotional problems like their own, able to be treated with the same drugs, for a price. Zookeepers, shelter workers,
veterinarians, animal advocates and others who've diagnosed (and sometimes treated) nonhuman animals have done so for a variety of reasons: to make display animals more pleasing to look at, to advocate for more just treatment, as a means of expanding their veterinary practices, of selling pet products or pharmaceuticals, in the context of research, out of empathy for other animals' well being, or some combination thereof. Furthermore, the clearer the line is drawn between normal/abnormal animal minds, labeling their compulsions, obsessions, traumas and disorders with the same labels used in humans, the more these human disorders become rooted in 'biological' soils.
As the anthropologist of medicine Arthur Kleinman writes, "Mental illnesses are real; but like other forms of the real world, they are the outcome of the creation of experience by physical stuff interacting with symbolic meanings."2 The focus of this dissertation is not
to argue that animal mental illness is "real," but instead to illustrate the socio-historical forces that have made communities of animal mental patients, animal mental health practitioners and therapists, and animal psychopharmaceuticals both possible and prevalent. These forces, as touched on above, are various and the historical unit of analysis quite long. Nevertheless, a helpful connection between the existing scholarship on the construction and history of human mental illness and the phenomena of other animal mental illness, is via Ian Hacking's notion of "transient mental illness" and the ecological concept of niche (which he employs to interrogate the 1 91h century epidemic of mad-travelers, or fugue sufferers).
2 Arthur Kleinman, Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience (New York:
Niches and Factors
For Hacking, the European fugue epidemic of the 1890s was possible because it filled a niche. To qualify as such, four conditions, he argues, must be met. The affliction must be understood as medical (fitting into a preexisting "taxonomy of illness"). It must draw on
a polarity inside culture, such as crime and virtue, and is held in tension between them. It must also be observable as a disorder and understood as suffering. It must be "something to escape" from and, finally, outside of causing pain or suffering it must also offer some sort of release that isn't otherwise available in the culture.3
In the case of 1890s Europe all of these elements came together in a way that made a fugue epidemic possible. Key factors included tourism-newly accessible to the working poor, a cadre of medical experts to identify the behavior, which came to represent a release and offered escape, and the fact at the disease played into a frothing fear of
4
vagrants and vagrancy.
Using Ian Hacking's conception of "niche" as a springboard5, I argue that, among Anglo-Americans living in close proximity to nonhuman animals, animal insanity or mental illnesses were made possible via the coming together of various socio-cultural factors at particular points over the course of the long 20th century. Because of the long time period covered (as opposed to Hacking's more tightly bounded study) and the various nature of
3 Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental illnesses (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002) 1-2, 81.
4 Ibid., 27.
the historical events, shifting attitudes, demographic changes and medical breakthroughs that have made animal insanity possible, I do not wish to argue that these factors are universally applicable, ie. present in every instance of ascription of disorder to animal minds. That being said, a few generalities exist and have been influential at the broadest of scales, offering a somewhat elastic framing inside of which the dissertation
interrogates specific cases concerning different species, historical time periods and phenomena of animal insanity.
These overarching factors include: acceptance of certain kinds of animal emotional experience as continuous with humans' in various British and American contexts (such as shared susceptibility to nostalgia or nervous disease in the first decades of the 2 0th
century or PTSD among service dogs and service men in contemporary US Army units);6
an equivalence of certain kinds of animals with certain kinds of humans (such as wild or feral animals with human criminals, the criminally insane or the poor and degenerate in late 19th century Britain, or pet dogs that sleep in beds, live inside, take medication and
are expected to meet certain standards of behavior, with American children in the second half of the 2 0th century); and working and shared understandings of "good" and "bad"
animal behavior among humans who live and work alongside other animals (as it applied to first exotic wildlife brought to the United States to be exhibited for display in the late
19th century, or in contemporary American zoos, animal behavior clinics and pet-owning households).
6 This acceptance was not uniformly applied to other animals, progressive, or even consistently shared but
came and went in various contexts throughout the long the 201h century. This dissertation looks at this on a case-by-case basis.
As with fugue, or mad traveling disease, many instances of animal mental disorder have also illustrated what Hacking has referred to as the social facts of mental illness. The multiple ways that human mental disorders have been identified in nonhuman minds in Britain and America at various points in history has frequently served as part of a system of social control that, in people, has been used to craft hierarchies related to gender, class, sexual-orientation, or race.7 When animals are deemed abnormal, this system turns
species specific, operating across animal cultures to constitute meaning from purportedly
abnormal animal acts in zoos, on farms, in living rooms, circuses or in nonhuman natures.
Chapter Summary
The first chapter, Mirrors and Proxies, places animal mental illness in the historical context of the late 1 9th century through the early-to-mid 2 0th to argue that nonhuman
animals such as dogs, horses, elephants and a number of other creatures were seen to suffer from certain transient mental disorders that also plagued humans during the same period, specifically: madness (both in the context of rabies and not), homesickness and nostalgia, brokenheartedness, and nervous diseases. This chapter lays out the socio-historical forces that made these transient mental illnesses both possible and prevalent, as well as the Victorian, and early 2 0th century notions of emotional expression that
undergirded them.
7 Hacking, Mad Travelers; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Chapter two, Animal Pharm, illustrates the role that nonhuman animals played in the development of psychopharmaceutical drugs (intended for human use) in the United States and Europe in the mid 2 0th century. Animal experimental subjects were not merely used to measure drug toxicology but to evaluate various drug effects on behavior and mood. These animals would arrive as test subjects but eventually, would be patients--parallel participants in the formation of what would come to be seen as a drug industry for the maintenance of good mood and behavior (as opposed to means of eradicating disease) in humans and other animals, a significant shift away from the shared rice gruels
8
and steam baths of the preceding century. As psychopharmaceutical drugs have become widely accepted as viable forms of treatment for humans, veterinary practitioners continue to prescribe antipsychotics, anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications to nonhuman animals as a means of alleviating suffering, as a form of behavioral control, and as a way of addressing what they identified as emotional problems and/or mental disorders in other species, part of a vast and thriving psychopharmaceutical marketplace.
The third chapter, Good Dog, Bad Dog: Pathology and Family Therapy, looks to the contemporary processes of pathologization and therapy at a veterinary clinic, shelter, various animal display facilities, and two different great ape exhibits, to suggest that such processes are not only used as a means of controlling and eradicating "disordered" and otherwise unwanted behavior in nonhumans, but are reflections of dominant human therapeutic practices. In the context of domestic animals (both pets and to a lesser extent, those raised for food and fur), the phenomenon of animal mental illness has tended to 8 It is important to note, however, that homeopathic, herbal and other home cures for pets were not replaced entirely by pharmaceutical treatments. There continues today to be a robust contingent of pet owners who use non-pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions for their pets, explained further in Chapter Three.
unfurl within narratives of control, a tension dependent upon widely accepted notions of good and bad behavior. And yet, this chapter complicates the idea that identifying mental disorders in other beings is solely bound up in notions of dominance. Instances of
therapeutic interventions for mental health maintenance in animals, heavily influenced by late 20th century practices such as family therapy, are complex stories of interspecies relations that may be both empathetic and controlling at once.
The final chapter, Animal Suicide, tackles perhaps the most vexing subject relating to animal mental illness: whether other animals can commit suicide. The chapter begins with short overview of the problematic nature of the term "suicide" itself, then turns to a
brief social history of animal suicide at the turn of the 2 0th century to suggest that such
accounts were reflections of shifting British and American attitudes towards both self-destruction and nonhuman nature and gave Anglo-Americans a means to talk about potentially taboo subjects without having to speak of humans directly. Animal suicide stories have also been a means of ascribing meaning to puzzling or otherwise mysterious animal acts. Turning to the topic of mass strandings among dolphins and whales, this chapter suggests that their frequent mentions in the mid-to-late 20th century American
popular press as "mass suicides" reflect both a lack of scientific consensus and also growing human anxieties about anthropogenic environmental harms. The chapter
concludes with a case of seemingly self-destructive wildlife off of the coast of California, representative of contemporary social concerns over possible links between
Literature Review
In his forward to The Animals Reader, Randy Malamud writes, "We cannot-despite the overarching claim of animal behaviorists-know what is on [animal] minds. We can train them to salivate at bells and play with language blocks, but we should not delude
ourselves that this is the same as knowing what they are thinking. We cannot know who
they are; but this does not stop us from wondering."9 It is, perhaps, this wonderment, both
the great richness and also the enigma that it represents that motivates so much of what Molly Mullin has called "the animal turn" in anthropology.'0
There has also been something of an animal turn in the discipline of history in recent decades. Contemporary historical scholarship, particularly in the sub-discipline of
environmental history, has expanded the role of animals and placed them more soundly in the center of the narrative. While Harriet Ritvo has placed nonhuman animals squarely in the middle of her historical scholarship since the 1980s, recently many others have
followed suit. Virginia Dejohn Anderson, Ian Miller, Kathleen Kete, Karen Rader, Ann Norton Green, Gregg Mitman, Robert Kohler, and other historians have all turned to the
roles of animals themselves in the shaping of history-not simply as commodities to be traded, hoarded or fought over-but as actors capable of shaping landscapes and ecosystems, the outcome of historical events, and influencing people.
9 Linda Kalof, and Amy J. Fitzgerald, The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (Oxford: Berg, 2007) x.
Animals are not recent arrivals in the disciplines of history or anthropology.
Environmental history, despite its emergence as a rather new sub-discipline of history, has long been concerned with the role of nonhuman entities in historical events-from the far-reaching consequences of wildfire or the shifting abundance of game, to the implications of weather patterns, hydrology and regional geologies on human histories." What is different about the more recent historical scholarship on animals is that much of it shifts their roles as passive bystanders or as sources of hides or protein to be exploited--to their portrayal as agents in their own right. There is ever-more scholarship shifting
animals to the center of historical stories-from Andrew Isenberg's work on the American Bison or Brett Walker's work on the wolves of Japan to Etienne Benson's scholarship on animal-tagging, surveillance and conservation.1 2
In anthropological, historical and theoretical scholarship animals have long appeared as commodities, cosmological symbols to untangle, food, biological agents,'3 and more
recently-as embodied manifestations of techno-scientific frontiers and productive (sentient) entities to think with.'5 They are also becoming far more visible as subjects in
Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) xv-6; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology ofNew England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003) xv-18, 159-170; William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) 1-23, 148-158, 207-217; Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History ofEcological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) ix- xiii. 12 Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 1-13; Etienne Benson, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of
Tracking and The Making ofModern Wildlife (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) 1-5.
1 See, for example: Lewis Henry Morgan, The American Beaver and His Works (Philadelphia, PA: J.B.
Lippincott & Co, 1868); Candace Slater, Dance ofthe Dolphin: Transformation and Disenchantment in the Amazonian Imagination (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1994) 59-89; Candice Slater,
Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 133-205. 14 Donna J. Haraway, ModestWitness@SecondMillennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997) 24-49; Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) 46-73.
and of themselves as scholars find productive material in the investigation of human-animal relationships16 and have discussed the primacy of animals in the discipline of anthropology itself.17
For both anthropologists and historians-investigations of animals on display in zoos and aquaria, highly managed within parks and protected areas, or raised and bred to be ideal experimental subjects, have pointed to notions of control implicit in highly constructed representations of naturalness.'8 Animals as commodities to be traced through society are
closely related to anthropological and historical work on the commodification of natures in general-from organs for sale to healthy zygotes-and the creation of ideal
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 1-16; Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) ix-58; Marjorie B. Garber, Dog Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 1-13.
16 Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) 1-18, 231-243, 279-303; Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 45-132, 275-302; James Serpell, In the Company ofAnimals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 1-22; Mitman and Daston, Thinking, 1-16, 121-136.
17 Mullin, "Animals," 387-93; Barbara Noske, "The Animal Question in Anthropology: A Commentary,"
Society & Animals 1, no. 2 (1993): 185-90; Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) 1-60; Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (London: Verso, 1998) 1-26.
18 Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 77-116; Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) xi-50; Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (New York: Berg, 2007) 27-48; Dale Jamieson, "Against Zoos," in Morality's Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest ofNature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA 2003) 166-175; Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006) 33-53; Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) 1-12, 143-188; William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) 69-90; Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Kalof and Fitzgerald, Animals
Reader; Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Films (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 1-4, 132-156.
experimental animals in particular.' 9 This dissertation builds on these conceptions of animals as (highly produced) representations of the wild, the untamed or other human categories-but also turns such interpretations in a new direction, demonstrating that other creatures have also been considered mentally ill and treated as such. What happens, for example, when the animals on the other side of the bars recieve their own
psychiatrists and what might this mean about the human beings who put them there? The animals become more than constructions of naturalness or idealized nature, they also become medicalized, or pathologized, and often enough, considered sufficiently intelligent or self aware to be driven insane.
While there has been fascinating and important scholarship on animals like mice, flies, sheep, dogs and monkeys as experimental subjects (in the work of Rader, Kohler, Kohn,
20
Franklin, Haraway and many others), there has been little attention paid, at least within the fields of history and anthropology of science and medicine, to conceptions of mental illness in nonhuman animals and, particularly, individual nonhuman animals. With the exception of Michael Worboys, who takes a quite interesting and largely materialist view
'9 Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Corinne P. Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) 1-18, 48-84, 125-157; Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and Susan Lindee, Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropolgy and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) ix-22; Karen A. Rader, Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 97-135; Charis Thompson, Making Parents; The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) 245-276; Franklin, Mixtures, 1-17; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in 'Fresh' Organs," in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. by Aihwa Ong and Sephen Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005) 145-168; Catherine Waldby, "Stem Cells, Tissue Cultures and the Production of Biovalue," Health: an Interdisciplinary Journalfor the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 6, no. 3 (2002): 305-23.
20 Franklin, Mixtures, 1-45; Haraway, Visions, 19-25, 59-83, 231-43; Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 1-91;
Eduardo Kohn, "How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement," American Ethnologist 34, no. I (February 2007): 3-24; Rader, Mice, 25-58.
of a canine hysteria epidemic in the first half of the 19th century in Britain and America 21_ -there has been little inquiry into the making and understanding of disordered nonhuman minds as subjects in their own right. My dissertation addresses this hole in the warp and weft of both contemporary historical and anthropological inquiry on the subject of mental
illness and the making of mental disorders and therapeutics in the Anglo-American world.
I offer a parallel historical and partially ethnographic narrative that focuses on nonhuman
animals at both the species and the individual level, and their complex relationship to the various caretakers and institutions that have defined them as pathological, sane, insane, abnormal or normal, and otherwise.
Notions of seeing are also very important in this effort. Historians and anthropologists such as Harriet Ritvo, Nigel Rothfels, Donna Haraway and others have looked to how animals are seen by human observers and how such gazing is highly related to human hierarchies of class, race, gender and state-making in socio-historical context.2 2 Other
scholarship has told tales of observation in the form of cognitive ethology, primatology, or the scientific investigations of animal culture.2 3
Gregg Mitman, Jennifer Price, and
21 Michael Worboys, "As if they had seen spooks: Canine Hysteria in the 1920s and 1930s." Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, May 1, 2011.
22 Harriet Ritvo, Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1987) 205-242; Nigel Rothfels, Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 3-34, 199-244; Dona J. Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936," Social Text 11 (1984): 20-64; Haraway, Visions, 279-303; Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion, 2004) 71-283; John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 3-30; Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 41-70.
23 Frans B. M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) 1-6, 209-216; Frans B. M. de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001) 177-295; Richard W. Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethnology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 1-16; Haraway, Visions, 19-25, 115-132.
Steve Baker have looked to animal representations on film, in the visual arts and at the mall (among other places) to illustrate the tracings of animals and imagination. Cristina Grasseni has even looked to cattle fair arenas as panopticon-like spaces that enable cow bodies to be seen as partitioned entities and a collection of functionalized traits.24
Ethics and rights debates also inform the narratives of animal therapeutics and treatment and have emerged as yet another way into the animal question in anthropology, critical theory, and history.2 5 Dale Jamieson, in particular, has looked to zoos as sites where
problematic species distinctions are woven into the very architecture (the confinement itself marking a false distinction between the animals who are caged and the human animals who are not), as well as the potential implications of anti-speciesist policies as they relate to interventions in nonhuman nature more generally.26 What happens when these questions of justice, liberty and treatment are linked to ones of relatedness? They unfold as kinship stories27 and as evolutionary narratives themselves.28 Evolutionary and
24 Mitman, Reel, xi-4, 180-220; Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 167-206; Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001) 1-76; Cristina Grasseni, "Designer Cows: The Practice of Cattle Breeding Between Skill and Standardization," Society and Animals 13, no. 1. (2005):
33-49, doi: 10.1163/1568530053966652.
25 Carol Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 3-82; Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) 1-22; Tom Regan, The Casefor Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review, 1990) 1-24, 213-250; Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, The
Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) 1-9; Paola Cavalieri,
The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001) 1-40, 69-86; Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rightsfor Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 1-8.
26 Jamieson, "Against Zoos," 166-175; and "The Rights of Animals and the Demands of Nature," Environmental Values 17 (2008), 181-189.
2 Harriet Ritvo, "Border Trouble: Shifting the Line Between People and Other Animals," Social Research 62, no. 3 (1995): 481-500; Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 1-28; Goodman et al., Genetic Nature, 95-154;
Morgan, American Beaver; Marilyn Strathern, After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century
classificatory tales (i.e. what makes an animal an animal and not a human") connect to understandings of madness, normalcy, control, and therapy across species lines in the subsequent chapters and are intrinsic to the subject of mental ill health among all animal species. These connections are closely related to scholarly work that has pointed to anthropomorphism as useful, deleterious and/or productive in the processes of
interrogating human minds, a process that this dissertation traces into various contexts preoccupied with identifying similarities in the expression of mental illness across
species lines.
Nonhuman animals as techno-scientific subjects and agents-such as Dolly the sheep or Oncomouse-have been the focus of both anthropological and historical inquiry before.3'
And the creation of the medicalized (human) body and the role of pharmaceuticals have been traced through hospitals, clinics, drugstores and delivery rooms.3 2 Since the animals
28 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Strugglefor Life (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859); Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871); Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1872).
29 Wolfe, Zoontologies, 1-58; Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman, At the Borders of the
Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 1-8; Cassidy and Mullin, Wild Things, 1-26, 123-146; Ritvo, "Border Trouble," 481-500; Tim Ingold, What is an Animal? (New York: Routlege, 1994) 1-16; Haraway, Species Meet, 1-3, 275-284; Darwin, Descent.
30 James Serpell, "Anthropomorphism and Anthropomorphic Selection-Beyond the 'Cute Response,"'
Society andAnimals 10, no. 4 (2002): 437-54; Mitman and Daston, Thinking, 37-58, 100-118, 121-136; Arluke and Sanders, Regarding Animals, 1-40; Harriet Ritvo, "Animal Consciousness: Some Historical Perspective," American Zoologist 40, no. 6 (2000): 847-52; James A. Shapiro, "A phenomenological
approach to the study of nonhuman animals," in R. W. Mitchell, N. S. Thompson, & H. L. Miles, Eds., Anthropomorphism, anecdotes and animals (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997) 277-295.
31 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_ Witness, 24-49; Franklin, Mixtures, 1-46; Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia: A
Natural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) 114-149; Kohler, Lords, 1-18, 53-90; Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 1-16.
32 Thompson, Making Parents, 1-27; Goodman et al., Genetic Nature, 59-76, 219-233; Emily Martin,
Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994) 7-19; Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) 13-16, 150-174; David Healy, The
included in this dissertation have been, in some cases, sites of scientific inquiry themselves (such as laboratory mice or apes) as well as beings under "treatment" (receiving psychoactive drugs so that they may be better performers, companions or representatives of their species--such as gorillas on display, pet dogs making life within the household difficult, or bonobos recovering from trauma suffered in research
facilities)--my investigation of the construction and identification of mental health diagnoses in nonhuman animals and their treatment with highly commoditized
pharmaceuticals is reliant on the work of other anthropologists and historians that have looked at similar processes in humans.
The historiography of mental illness is rich on this subject, including the processes of conceiving, making and applying diagnoses onto "disordered" minds, the evolution of various therapeutics-from psychosurgery and electroshock therapy to psychoanalysis and pharmaceuticals; the use of psychiatry as a form of social control, as well as a means of conceiving of and explaining criminality; the internal workings of mad houses,
asylums, psychiatric institutions and even the "mad-doctors" and therapists themselves. Foucault's writings on the prison, the asylum and the hospital showed that 18th and I9th
century inmates and patients of these institutions were subjects of discipline-the assignations of insanity deployed as a means of controlling and punishing inconvenient views, opinions and lifestyles.3 3 As this dissertation suggests, many of these themes are
Creation ofPsychopharmacology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression, Medicine, Culture, and History (New York City: New York University Press, 2004) 1-39, 259-283.
33 Foucault, Discipline, 135-169, 177-230; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) 65-84, 241-278; Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology ofMedical Perception (London: Tavistock, 1976) ix-xix; Michel
applied selectively and unevenly to disturbed and/or disturbing animals in clinics, shelters, sanctuaries and family homes.
Roy Porter has written multiple social histories of madness, madhouses and mad-doctoring in Great Britain that provide a foundation for investigations into the making and understanding of nonhuman madness.3 4 Edward Shorter has composed various broad
histories of psychiatry, and on mood disorders in particular.3 5 Andrew Scull has
constructed historical narratives of the shift in Britain away from the mad-doctoring trade, as well as social histories of hysteria.36 All of these large-scale narratives can be brought to bear on the history of nonhuman mental health. Other scholars' historical
investigations of particular disorders are also helpful. Narratives on hysteria include Mark
Micale's Approaching Hysteria, Georges Didi-Huberman's work on representations of
the disease at the Salpetribre, Asti Hustvedt's scholarship on hysteria in Paris, Lerner's portrait of hysterical men, Elizabeth Lunbeck on hysteria in Boston women and Elaine
37
Showalter's portrayal of hysterical women in England. Susan Matt's work on
3 Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors & Lunatics (Stroud, Gloucestershire:
Tempus, 2004) 1-42; Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 34-62; Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in Englandfrom the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987) 110-160; Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987).
35 Edward Shorter, A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley, 1997) 1-113; Edward Shorter, Before Prozac: The Troubled History ofMood Disorders in Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
36 Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Disturbing History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 6-152;
Andrew Scull, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996) 3-9, 226-268; Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary ofAfflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) 175-231.
37 Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) 1-33, 56-88; Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salptriere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004) xi-28; Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-century Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011) 1-32; Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2009) 86-162; Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and
homesickness and nostalgia in the United States38 and David Healy's on bipolar disorder, for example, is instructive for assembling the historical contexts that made animal cases of nostalgia and homesickness or, more recently mood disorders, possible. 39Allan Young eloquently narrated the emergence and conceptualization of PTSD as an applicable disorder (a disorder that has, in the last decade been increasingly applied to other animals).40
The subject of nervous diseases and trauma in soldiers throughout the 1 9th and 2 0th
centuries has also been plumbed by Micale, Lerner and Shephard and can find parallels in perceptions of animal others.41 George Minois has looked at changing conceptions of
suicide in the broadest of all senses.42 Jonathan Metzel has documented the use of psychiatric diagnoses like schizophrenia in an attempt to marginalize African American
activists during the civil rights protests of the 1960s and seventies.43 Elizabeth Lunbeck looks to early 2 0th century Boston to plumb ideas of psychiatric treatment, power
Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) 1-3; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
38 Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 1-6,
178-183.
39 David Healy, Mania: A Short History ofBipolar Disorder (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2008) xi-1, 135-218.
4Allan Young, The Harmony ofIllusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997) 7-9, 21-25, 111-113; Gay Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge: What
Animals Teach Us About Humanity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) 1-33; Gay Bradshaw et al., "Building an Inner Sanctuary: Complex PTSD in Chimpanzees," Journal of Trauma & Dissociation: The Official Journal of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD) 9, no. 1 (2008): 9-34;
Gay Bradshaw et al., "Elephant Breakdown," Nature 433, no. 7028 (2005): 807-807; Hope R. Ferdowsian et al., "Signs of Mood and Anxiety Disorders in Chimpanzees," PLoS ONE 6, no. 6 (2011),
doi:10.1371/joumal.pone.0019855, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/joumal.pone.0019855.
41 Mark S. Micale and Paul Lemer, eds. Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 1-30; Lerner, Hysterical Men;
Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) 1-21, 53-73.
42 Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999) 1-7, 302-328.
43 Johnathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston, MA:
relations and gender conflicts.44 Many of these tales have nonhuman animal
mirrors--those diagnosed, tagged, or classified with the same terms. Histories of human
therapeutics frequently mention nonhuman animal stand-ins and include Jack Pressman's work on psychosurgery (and Andrew Scull's critique of this work) and include tales of the first animal proxies for human patients.45
David Healy has perhaps done the most exhaustive historical scholarship on the
emergence of psychopharmaceuticals and the vast industries behind them, both of which are germane to the topic of psychopharmaceuticals use in other animals.4 6 Andrea Tone
has discussed the history of tranquilizer use in the United States and the animal actors who first demonstrated their usefulness.47 Jonathan Metzel has written about Prozac and
gender.48 More recently Deborah Weinstein has illustrated the rise of family therapy in post World War II America,49 a form of therapy that has co-evolved with animal
emotional therapeutics and the centralizing roles of companion animals in American households.
Anthropology of medicine has also focused on the pathologization of mental states and mental life in ways that inform efforts to plumb shifting relationships between human
44 Lunbeck, Persuasion, 3-4.
45 Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) 13, 48-65; Andrew Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale ofMegalomania and Modern Medicine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) 1-28.
46 Healy, Prozac, xvi-33, 259-283; David Healy, The Antidepressant Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997); Healy, Creation.
4 Andrea Tone, The Age ofAnxiety: A History ofAmerica's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers (New
York: Basic Books, 2008) 27-117.
48 Jonathan Michel Metzl, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 74-81, 101-102, 159.
49 Deborah Fran Weinstein, The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) 1-9, 136-138, 154-179.
