Development of a medical management system for psychiatric patients in Prussia in the 1st half of the 19th century

In recent years, som noted authors have been reappraising the distinctive features of the history of psychiatry, setting out its relationship to social history. Trends and models, and the legal basic of psychiatric care are demonstrated, taking the early days of psychiatry in Prussia as an example. In the first half of the 19th century there was in Prussia an especially coherent development from the dual-purpose mental hospital/mental home arrangement (Neuruppin), through total separation of asylum from hospital from home for incurables (Siegburg, Leubus) inaugurated by Langermann, to the more or less linking of asylum with hospital with home for incurables (Nietleben) under Damerow.     

The relational self-concept scale: a context-specific self-report measure for adolescents.

This paper describes an alternative approach to measuring the self that directly accounts for the way individuals ruminate on their external actions in order to inform and maintain their self-image. This was achieved by designing the Relational Self-Concept Scale (RSCS), a measure that explores the role and impact that different social encounters within and around the school context have upon self-concept formation. Analysis of responses to this context-specific self-report measure, obtained from a large sample of adolescents (N = 978), confirmed that the scale is multidimensional, possesses appropriate psychometric properties, and contains a high degree of ecological validity.     

Book reviews

Patterson, K., Marshall, J, C. and Coltheart, M. (Eds.). Surface dyslexia : Neuropsychological and cognitive studies of phonological reading. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1985. Pp. 544. ISBN 0-86377-026-6. £29.95.

Donovan, B. T. Hormones and human behaviour. Cambridge : Cambridge Unversity Press. 1985. Pp. 223. ISBN 0-521-25881-2. £25.00.

Harris, M. D. Introduction to Natural Language Processing. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall International. 1985. Pp. 366. ISBN 0-8539-3253-2. £25.00.

Daniloff, N. (Ed.). Speech science—Recent advances. London: Taylor and Francis. 1982. Pp. 326. ISBN 0-85066-501-9. £30.00.

Haugeland, J. Artificial Intelligence-The very Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 1985. Pp. 287. ISBN 0-262-08153-9. £14.95.

Sampson, G. Writing systems. London: Hunthcinson. 1985. Pp. 234. ISBN 0-091-56980-X. £19.65.

Pavlidis, G. Th. and Fisher, D. f. (Eds.). Dyslexia: Its neuropsychology and treatment 1986. Chichester: John Wiley. £29.50.