“The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.”

—  Thomas Szasz

Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (1979)

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Thomas Szasz 70
Hungarian psychiatrist 1920–2012

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