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<span style="color:#363636;font-family:verdana;font-size:11px;">"Professor Johan Schioldann’s scholarly account of his detailed and painstaking investigations into the early medical uses of lithium and, in particular, into the manner in which this remarkable element was introduced into psychiatric treatment, represents a major contribution to the study of the history medicine.<br /><br />Although the ideas of Carl Lange, a Danish neuropathologist, and his brother Frederik (Fritz) Lange, a psychiatrist, have been referred to by a number of previous writers on the history of lithium therapy, it has fallen, fittingly, to one of their fellow countrymen to establish beyond any doubt the seminal importance of the work they carried out over a century ago. Adopting a narrative-analytical approach to his material, Schioldann has produced a rigorous and erudite account of a fascinating era in medical history, and has managed to do so in a wonderfully readable fashion.<br /><br />Even those with little or no background in medicine will be enthralled by the story that unfolds in this book: a story of the way in which ideas become disseminated, and of the interactions between ideas and those whom they touch.<br /><br />This book will be widely welcomed, not only by medical historians and by psychiatrists involved in the day-to-day practice of lithium therapy, but by all those who are fascinated by the way in which a deceptively simple chemical element led to a revolution in modern psychiatric medicine."<br /><br /><strong>Dr. F. Neil Johnson, author of <em>History of Lithium Therapy</em>. London: McMillan, 1984.</strong></span><div><span style="color:#363636;font-family:verdana;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:13px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color:#363636;font-family:verdana;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:13px;"><span style="font-weight:normal;line-height:15px;">"Armed with a historiography that most medics will empathise with, Professor Schioldann has tackled a hard problem and managed to advance the field. This advance not only concerns the history of lithium therapy, Schioldann providing penetrating analyses of the contributions of the Lange brothers in the late 1800s and John Cade in 1947–49, but also the history of psychopharmacology in general. He has re-mapped the field and shown that earlier maps were incomplete or inaccurate."<br /><br /><strong>Emeritus Professor G. E. Berrios, Chair of the Epistemology of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge.</strong></span><br /></span></div>