Mental Ills and Bodily Cures depicts a time when physicians attempted to heal the mind by treating the body with methods we might now find extreme and perhaps even brutal.

From a treasure trove of California psychiatric hospital records, including many verbatim transcripts of patient interviews, Joel Braslow masterfully reconstructs this "therapeutic" world of mental patients and their doctors, a world composed of drastic somatic treatments such as hydrotherapy, sterilization, electroshock, lobotomy, and clitoridectomy. Though these therapies have often been dismissed as a product of an unenlightened psychiatric past, Braslow takes seriously the ways in which doctors and patients combined the social and the scientific to create what they - doctors more so than patients - believed to be effective remedies.

His approach illuminates the cultural and medical context of these largely abandoned practices and suggests ways in which the social, now, as then, is an inseparable part of our medical universe.