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I don’t like to use the worn out word . . . “bruise” in my poems, but this morning . . . one appears on my inner thigh

In preparing DSM-IV, we worked hard to avoid causing confusion in forensic settings. Realizing that lawyers read documents in their own special way, we had a panel of forensic psychiatrists go over every word to reduce the risks that DSM IV could be misused in the courts.

Andreas Killen bio

Andreas Killen, PhD, is Associate Professor of History at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has held fellowships at the UCLA Humanities Consortium and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Among his publications are Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (University of California Press 2006) and a special volume of Osiris that he co-edited on the history of the human sciences. Currently he is working on a book about the relation between film and the human sciences in early 20th century Germany.

Hans Pols bio

Hans Pols, PhD, is senior lecturer at the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is interested in the history of psychiatry and the mental hygiene movement in North America and Europe, psychiatric war syndromes, and colonial psychiatry, in particular in the Dutch East Indies.

Greg Eghigian bio

Greg Eghigian, PhD, is Associate Professor of Modern History and former Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Penn State University, University Park, Pa. He writes and teaches on the history of madness, mental illness, and mental health in the Western world.  He is the co-editor and author of numerous books, most recently From Madness to Mental Health;  Psychiatric Disorder and its Treatment in Western Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2010). He is co-editor of h-madness, a blog that follows the history of psychiatry.