Anxiety: A Short History

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The first known representations of anxiety are found in cave paintings from the Paleolithic era. They vividly depict sources of fear— usually dangerous predators such as lions, wolves, and bears— among our primeval ancestors. Sophisticated discussions of the nature and sources of anxiety emerged during the fourth century BCE in Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian philosophy. The vast array of available works spans both a temporal range of thousands of years and a variety of medical, philosophical, religious, psychological, and sociological discourses. A book of this length can hardly encompass the huge sweep of material about anxiety. Therefore, I have limited the scope of the book to Western discussions and neglected the diverse understandings of anxiety found in, among other places, China, Japan, India, and the Middle East. In addition, the enormity of the range of literature has meant that I have made unusually heavy reliance on the writings of other historically oriented scholars. I have found especially valuable the studies of Germain Berrios, Joanna Bourke, Gerrit Glas, David Herzberg, Stanley Jackson, Michael MacDonald, George Makari, Mark Micale, Janet Oppenheim, Roy Porter, Charles Rosenberg, Andrew Scull, Edward Shorter, Andrea Tone, and Yi-fu Tuan. None of these outstanding researchers, of course, is responsible for the uses to which I have put their work. I am grateful for the institutional support I received while writing this book. It was completed while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford University. I greatly appreciate the opportunity that the center and its director , first Stephen Kosslyn and then Iris Litt, gave me to spend a year in its unparalleled environment. As always, David Mechanic, the director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and xv Aging Research at Rutgers University, provided invaluable support for my work. David is also responsible for creating at Rutgers a unique climate in which historical vision is seen as an essential framework for understanding current issues regarding health and health policy. My interactions at the institute with such gifted historians as Gerald Grob, Keith Wailoo, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Nancy Tomes have profoundly shaped my own scholarship. I’m also grateful to Melissa Lane, Helene Pott, and Jamie Walkup for their ideas about improving this manuscript. My editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, Jacqueline Wehmuller, provided insightful suggestions that have greatly enhanced the book, and Anne Whitmore at the Press was an unusually capable copy editor. I am especially appreciative of the efforts of distinguished historian Charles Rosenberg, the editor of the series of biographies of diseases in which this book appears. Charles provided astute advice from the book’s initial conception to its final drafts. I thank him for the opportunity to extend my writing from its native sociological grounds to new historical territory. xvi Acknowledgments ANXIETY This page intentionally left blank ...