Extraordinary Cases in psychology: Part 1 of 4 - The story of Kitty Genovese (broadcast not podcast only)
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What is the Bystander Effect and why does the Kitty Genovese case matter for psychology?
This is an ABC Radio National podcast, and we have many more to choose from, which you can hear details about after this programme. But right now, we hope you enjoy this podcast.
This week's podcast edition of All in the Mind is different from the broadcast version because of BBC copyright reasons. But a link to the streaming audio of the BBC series that Australian audience has heard on air. can be found on All in the Mind's website at abc.net.au slash R N slash all in the mind. Meanwhile, here's a show from our archives, The Inner Life of the Broken Brain.
A generation or so ago it was still politically correct and possible and polite to be fascinated by exotic natives. And we're not really supposed to do that anymore. Anthropologists don't offer us those kinds of fare anymore. Brain scientists now, neurologists do. Uh they offer us an opportunity to engage with uh natives that are as strange and exotic as anything. we might ever have had a chance to encounter in the past.
I've kept travel journals for forty years. I think these were like precursors of case histories, their sort of landscape paintings, their narratives. I think this impulse to chronicle and describe travels allied itself with medicine. One way and another, all my work is about being an individual and preserving identity and preserving dignity and not being squashed flat by the weight of disease or the weight of people's reaction. I think that this has to be the first thing in nursing homes and hospitals and in in schools, everywhere. I think I'm against mechanical uh forms of teaching or treatment. Everyone needs individual treatment and everyone needs individual teaching and maybe in individual politics and theology and religion, but somehow we all we all get ground into a system or a machine.
Well-known neurologist and author Oliver Sachs, there, delighting an Australian audience in 1992 for the science show. Today, the first of two programs I've got for you exploring the unexpected connections between the neurosciences and storytelling. Sachs has called himself a neuroanthropologist, and his extraordinary tales about his patients have been published in books. Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings and made into blockbuster movies too. And like the work of many others, his investigations of broken brains have really helped us better understand the healthy brain and what it can do. But what we're asking here is beyond their scientific use, why do we find the sorts of narratives that Sachs specialises in so compelling?
Is it the guilty frisson of voyeurism, perhaps? Or does it represent a dissident effort to humanise the brain sciences? Well that's certainly the argument of my guest today, an acclaimed historian of science at Harvard
University. I'm interested as as an historian of science in these histories we don't tend to tell. We tell a story about the making of the neurosciences that's all focused on accumulation of knowledge about the brain, but we don't tell our histories usually in terms of the parade of patience. The parade of suffering individuals that made our knowledge of the brain possible. So it's it's something to do with wanting to an interest I have in wanting to reclaim the the hidden or the forgotten or the overlooked parts uh of our past and seeing what would happen if you brought those into the light of day alongside the more official histories.
Professor Anne Harrington, who specialises in the history of the mind sciences at Harvard University. She's also a visiting professor this year with the London School of Economics. Amongst Anne's books are Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain and the Placebo Effect and Interdisciplinary Exploration. And she teaches a course at Harvard University called Narrative and Neurology, in which she unearths some of the unofficial histories she's been talking about. All those life stories we find in the bookshop these days about Alzheimer's and autism, brain damage and a whole bunch of other brain disorders is part of what she calls the neurological turn in our society.
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