Word: wertham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Wertham's subject is murder. It seems that more people are killed each year by other people than by tuberculosis. Taking murder purely as a fatal disease, Dr. Wertham examines the role of psychiatry in homicide. He connects the two in the following manner: "Murder grows from negative emotions, from fear and hatred, from anxiety and anger, from frustration and desperation, and resentment. The science of emotions is psychiatry...
...most part, "The Show of Violence" recounts actual murder cases in which the question of the defendant's sanity played the major role. In all these cases, official psychiatry was grotesquely bungled. Dr. Wertham, who was closely connected with the cases, tells the stories to the tune of his bitter critiques...
This book is not a technical treatise. It should fascinate anyone interested in criminal law or psychiatry, or both. The sole flaw in the book is Dr. Wertham's habit of self-congratulation. His own treatments and diagnoses are always correct, those of his colleagues are usually wrong or incompetent, and if the judge had listened to him everything would have turned out all right. The reader is left with the picture of the author battling alone against the forces of stupidity, as represented by judicial and medical quacks. This is purely a personal flaw, though; Dr. Wertham's style...
Finally, the case histories in this book are intensely interesting, but some of them require a pretty strong stomach. For instance, one of Dr. Wertham's patients cut up a little girl, fried her with carrots and onions...
...York Herald Tribune Radio Columnist John Crosby, who thought he detected a likeness between the whiskered shmoo and a certain Chicago newspaper publisher, the book was "one of the finest satiric creations since Gulliver's Travels." (No, said Capp modestly, that was overrating Dean Swift.) To Dr. Frederic Wertham, a Manhattan psychiatrist who crusades against comic books, the shmoo offered "a solution of human problems on the same spurious level as Nietzsche's superman or the Superman of the comic books. It is a super-animal...