Word: venner
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Holmes novels, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel and A Mortal Antipathy, seem morbid, sententious, very unlike his other writings. All three deal with characters on the borderline of insanity. Contemporary critics called them "medicated novels." This description is favorably endorsed by Clarence P. Oberndorf of Columbia University, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In The Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Columbia University Press; $3) he finds clear evidence that Holmes was 100 years ahead of his time...
Psychic Suicide. Elsie Venner is Holmes's most interesting and hardest case. Holmes's analysis of her "psychic suicide" is a model of modern psychiatric thinking. His account of her symptoms (a stiff, frozen demeanor, withdrawal into herself, occasional wild behavior) was a precise description of schizophrenia-though the word and disease were unknown in Holmes...