Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction: The Age of Nervousness; The Triumph of the Therapeutic; Neurosis as a Contagious Diagnosis; The Specifically Swedish Experience of Neurosis; Ideas of Madness: On the Intellectual History of Psychiatry; On the Study of Neurosis; The Structure of the Book; PART I MEDICALISED MODERNITY; Chapter One On the Swedish Path to Modernity; Chapter Two How Swedes Became Nervous; Chapter Three Weak Nerves, Degeneration and Racial Hygiene: Health Ideology in the Age of Nervousness
Summary
In late 19th-century Sweden, paths to modernity created socio-cultural conditions conducive to the dissemination of the language of nerves. This book shows how neurosis became an extremely contagious diagnosis, and how our modern language of discontent, stress and malaise has a history that goes back to the birth of modern neuroses in the 1880s
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 363-381) and index
