Word: praecox
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...directed (ludicrously) and promoted (brilliantly) the first grindhouse classics. The 1934 Maniac, about a mad scientist's even daffier assistant whose ailurophobia leads him to rip out a cat's eye and eat it ("Why, it's not unlike an oyster"), pretended to be a serious study of dementia praecox. Esper used the old carny come-on--it's so sinful you have to pay to see it--in Tell Your Children, a silly antidrug screed produced by a Los Angeles church group. After he added some skin, Esper retitled the film Reefer Madness and made a bundle...
...White House Chief of Staff, Fritz Gimbel, who may or may not have murdered the Secretary. The plot builds up to a superb denouement. One wonders if all is fiction. For example, President Webster's description of Congress: "A collection of minor-league dipsomaniacs and fugitives from dementia praecox. "Echoes of Harry...
...Dyslexia Praecox. Susan started out with what should have been an insuperable handicap for an actress. She had dyslexia, a congenital brain condition that hampers her ability to read aloud. She still aches at memories of trying to get through London's Hampshire School (founded by her mother). "I remember standing up in class trying to read Shakespeare, and I could hear all the other children sniggering and laughing, because I'd be literally making it up. I remember thinking: when I grow up, people are not going to laugh at me. So I thought, who do they...
Radical Thoughts. Dr. Menninger came by both his iconoclasm and his optimism early in his career. As a student at Harvard Medical School he reproached his psychiatry professor: "What's the use? You give nearly every patient the same diagnosis, dementia praecox, and the treatment seems to be merely committing them to the nearest state hospital." That was in 1915, and only three years later, at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, the young Dr. Menninger found that "dementia praecox" had already gone out of fashion; the new label was "schizophrenia." But under any name the condition was still considered hopeless. Then...
...divided mind." Bleuler (1857-1939) was not satisfied with the rigid 19th century view of "dementia praecox" as a single, precisely definable disease whose victims were doomed to progressive deterioration. In 1911 he characterized the various forms of withdrawal from the real to an unreal world as "a group of schizophrenias." Most importantly, he insisted that continuous deterioration was not inevitable...