Anne Harrington (born 1960) is an American science historian and the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. Her primary research area is the history of

psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry. Initial psych ...

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...

, and cognitive science.

Education and career

Harrington obtained her

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

from Harvard University in 1982. She then attended the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, where she earned a doctorate in modern history, specializing in the history of science, in 1985. She returned to Harvard in 1988, after holding postdoctoral positions in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

and

Freiburg Freiburg im Breisgau (; abbreviated as Freiburg i. Br. or Freiburg i. B.; Low Alemannic: ''Friburg im Brisgau''), commonly referred to as Freiburg, is an independent city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. With a population of about 230,000 (as o ...

, joining the Department of the History of Science as an assistant professor. She was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and full professor four years later. At Harvard, Harrington has taught courses on "Madness and Medicine", "Evolution and Human Nature", "Broken Brains", “Stories under the Skin”, "

Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...

and the American Academy", "The Minded Body" and "In Search of Mind."

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

In this book Harrington shows that the pathological basis of almost all mental disorders remains as unknown today as it was in 1886. Even as psychiatrists prescribe a widening variety of treatments, none of them can say exactly why any of these biological therapies work. Regarding the "

chemical imbalance Scientific studies have found that different brain areas show altered activity in humans with major depressive disorder (MDD), and this has encouraged advocates of various theories that seek to identify a biochemical origin of the disease, as opp ...

" theory of mental illness, she writes “Ironically, just as the public was embracing the ‘serotonin imbalance’ theory of depression, researchers were forming a new consensus” about the idea behind that theory: It was “deeply flawed and probably outright wrong.” A reviewer in ''The Atlantic'' wrote: " ’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster."

Selected publications

* ''Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain'' (1987) * ''Reenchanted Science'' (1997) * ''The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine'' (2007) * ''The Dalai Lama at MIT'' (co-edited with

Arthur Zajonc Arthur Guy Zajonc ( ; born 11 October 1949, Boston, Massachusetts) is a physicist and the author of several books related to science, mind, and spirit; one of these is based on dialogues about quantum mechanics with the Dalai Lama. Zajonc, professor ...

, 2008) *

References

External links

* * Living people 1960 births Alumni of the University of Oxford Harvard University faculty American historians of science American women historians 20th-century American historians 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American historians 21st-century American women writers Harvard College alumni {{US-sci-historian-stub

Education and career

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

See also

Selected publications

References

External links