Why read A Question of Madness?

Book cover of A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union

Book description

Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet biochemist and outspoken critic of the Soviet bureaucracy, who was railroaded into a mental hospital, and his brother, historian Roy Medvedev, who rallied the Soviet scientific and intellectual community in protest, together tell the story of "repression by psychiatry" in Russia today.

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Question of Madness as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

William De Jong Lambert

Author

Less than a decade after Lysenko’s downfall, Zhores Medvedev published The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, one of the first and most fascinating accounts of the controversy published during the Cold War.

For this and other acts of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, Medvedev was declared insane and forced into a mental hospital where the challenge of keeping one’s sanity around people telling you you are crazy became his daily existence. Chilling.

From William's list on the history of modern science.