Download or read book Keeping America Sane written by Ian Robert Dowbiggin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychiatrists at the end of the nineteenth century felt professionally vulnerable, Dowbiggin explains, because they were under intense pressure from state and provincial governments and from other physicians to reform their specialty. Eugenics ideas, which dominated public health policy making, seemed the best vehicle for catching up with the progress of science. Among the prominent psychiatrist-eugenicists Dowbiggin considers are G.