Anne Harrington

Anne Harrington

Anne Harrington is <a title="Anne Harrington – Harvard University" href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/harrington.html" target="_blank">Harvard College Professor and Professor for the History of Science</a>, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences. She was my college professor for a seminar entitled “Evolution and the Mind” (History of Science 176), and I last saw her when she spoke at the <a title="Being Human" href="http://www.beinghuman2012.org/speakers/" target="_blank">Being Human</a> conference in San Francisco on March 24, 2012, along with my friend [[Laurie Santos]]. She gave a very interesting presentation on epidemics of hysteria/schizophrenia-like female illnesses and their treatments at different places and times in history, with the conclusion that there’s an inbuilt human mechanism for hard-wired healing mechanisms to be activated by medical treatment rituals and medicines in whatever form (e.g. pills) is dictated by the set of social norms governing a given society.

From her Being Human profile: “She is currently working on a new general audience book that uses small-scale historical narrative—intimate human stories across time—to help people make sense of the big-scale issues that define modern psychiatry, broadly understood. Other research interests include the history of the neurological case history, and especially changing interests in the ‘inner world’ of brain disorder; and the origins and larger significance of current visions of partnership between Buddhism and science.

” According to her Harvard website, she’s working on a new book called <em>When Minds Fall Ill</em>.

Books: <em>Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain </em>(1987); <em>Reenchanted Science</em> (1997); <em>The Cure Within; A History of Mind-Body Medicine</em> (2007).

Edited collections: <em>The Placebo Effect</em> (1997);<em>Visions of Compassion</em> (2000); <em>The Dalai Lama at MIT</em> (2006).