Edward Shorter

Edward Shorter, PhD., (born 1941) is a American/Canadian medical historian and writer. He is the Jason A. Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Doctor Shorter responded to the 2015 Institute of Medicine report saying "Their report is valueless, junk science at its worst."

Education

 * 1968, PhD., Harvard University, in modern social history

Articles

 * 19 Feb 2015, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is Back! But the new Institute of Medicine report is driven by politics, not science This article in Psychology Today was pulled and replaced with a less strongly-worded one a week later. However, in both, he criticizes the Institute of Medicine committee: "It’s a committee that the CFS patients’ lobby has roped, captured, and hogtied. How the Institute of Medicine could have let itself in for this embarrassment is a mystery." "Nothing has changed since then [1992] in scientific terms. There have been no convincing new studies, no breakthrough findings of organicity, nothing.""But, rather than SEID, what many of these patients have is a kind of delusional somatization, the unshakeable belief that something is wrong with their bodies rather than their minds."
 * 23 Feb 2015, Chronic Fatigue in the Context of the History of Medicine: Lives today are ruined by CFS Shorter writes:"Is it possible that the symptoms of ME/CFS are occasionally caused by a real but undiagnosed disease? In some cases, undoubtedly. But the term includes two other clinical populations as well: patients with delusional somatization, who simply misinterpret the signals their bodies are sending off; and patients with a psychiatric disorder such as depression, which often causes feelings of pain and fatigue. The interests of these latter two groups are not well served by asserting that they have an occult organic illness."

Books

 * 2015, What Psychiatry Left Out of the DSM-5: Historical Mental Disorders Today
 * 2013, Partnership for Excellence: Medicine at the University of Toronto and Academic Hospitals
 * 2013, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown
 * 2010, Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia, co-authored with Max Fink
 * 2009, Before Prozac
 * 2007, Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness, co-authored with David Healy
 * 2007, Chapter 2, "Chronic Fatigue in Historical Perspective" in Ciba Foundation Symposium 173 - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
 * 2005, A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry
 * 2000, The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation
 * 1997, History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
 * 1993, From the Mind Into the Body
 * 1992, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era
 * 1991, Doctors and Their Patients: A Social History
 * 1990, Women's Bodies: A Social History of Women's Encounter with Health, Ill-Health, and Medicine
 * 1987, The Health Century
 * 1986, Bedside Manners: The Troubled History of Doctors & Patients
 * 1983, A History of Women's Bodies
 * 1977, The Making of the Modern Family

Online presence

 * PubMed - E Shorter
 * Twitter
 * Website

Learn more

 * University of Toronto - Edward Shorter