Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hint from a Hypnotist. Austrian Anton Mesmer, who gave his name (mesmerism) to a technique now called hypnotism, has been called a faker. More likely, some modern psychiatrists think, he was a stupid man who blundered into an idea too big for him: the phenomena of suggestion and suggestibility. A Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, demonstrated that hypnotism could both arouse and quiet symptoms of hysteria. Charcot also bid for fame as the teacher of a Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud (rhymes with overjoyed...
Freud was, without any dispute, the father of modern psychiatry. He started fights that are still raging; but every psychiatrist, pure Freudian or not, admits his debt to the master. During the past 25 years, Freud's ideas have in some way influenced-or thrilled or outraged-almost every literate person on earth...
...sometimes effectively used to jolt depressed psychotics back to normal. Some psychiatrists admit that electric shock superficially resembles the medieval torture of the insane. (The beatings that the insane used to get, with chains, whips or rods, may actually have helped them, no matter what the intent.) The modern version is applied with more humanity, no more understanding of what makes it work. But patients who are so sick that they cannot talk at all may be able to talk after shock. Psychiatrists try to use such brief lucid periods to start helpful treatment...
...their lives of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation, have nowhere to go but the state institutions. Some of these are good, some not much better than Hogarth's 18th Century Bedlam, but few of them can do much to cure their patients. Because of lack of money, modern psychiatry is an all-too-rare visitor in the state hospitals...
...Paris meter bar has served the world well, but there are two things wrong with it. Modern techniques of measurement make the fine engraved lines on the bar seem coarse and irregular. Then too, many scientists feel that the metric system should not be based on an arbitrary length, but upon some length taken from nature itself. Then, if all the meter bars were destroyed (by atomic war, for instance), the standard could be reestablished, as good as ever, when the radioactive smoke had cleared away...