Psychiatry is a very abstract study. That is why they call it a "soft science." It's earliest roots are only decades, not centuries. In the novel Regeneration, by Pat Barker, their are two different types of therapy used in psychiatry at the time, electric shock therapy and communication therapy. Electric shock therapy is immoral. It is painful to the patient and does not have a a high rate of patient satisfactory. It is done against a patient's will. It usually doesn't work. Communication therapy is so much better than electric shock therapy.

Doctor Rivers, the protagonist in the novel, has been in a psychiatric ward for a number of years now. He is much older than his patients, who are mostly young men brought to him from the war. Craiglockhart, located in England, is a place where soldiers victimized by...