The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society

The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society is not simply a report of work done within and upon a hospital, but represents one more effort by a social scientist to demonise psychiatry.

Abstract

The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society. By William Caudill. Price, $6.50. Pp. 412. Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, Mass., 1958. The hospital of which Caudill writes is the Yale Psychiatric Institute. Caudill was brought in 1949 by Redlich, who, in his interesting foreword to this volume, enumerates reasons why it is unlikely that an anthropologist will again collect data under the guise of being himself a patient. But Caudill has again employed the effective method known as field work, including, this time, quantification of certain of his data, plus a TAT-type of picture-interview. Unlike the field-work study done by Stanton and Schwartz, Caudill reports upon an entire hospital rather than a single ward. The impact of his study has long since been felt in the Yale Hospital, according to Redlich, who also comments that there is no doubt in my mind that psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, psychiatric nurses, and other ward personnel have much to learn from such a social working in the hospital along with the more usual staff personnel. Redlich's comment is a key to Caudill's book. The book is not simply a report of work done within and upon a hospital : it represents one more effort by a social scientist to demon¬