The Quadruplets Research Committee that Rosenthal oversaw included psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, sociologists and a geneticist. Gathering up the committee’s disparate findings, Rosenthal published “The Genain Quadruplets: A Case Study and Theoretical Analysis of Heredity and Environment in Schizophrenia” in 1963, when psychiatry itself was at a crossroads, and President Kennedy had called for the replacement of state hospitals with community care. The violence and dysfunction Farley describes is gothically sordid, painful to read about and entirely believable. But as the fairy-tale title suggests, “Girls and Their Monsters” is more concerned with the mythic and metaphorical than the medical. Farley’s subtitle replaces schizophrenia, heredity and environment with “the Making of Modern Madness,” evoking Thomas Szasz’ “The Manufacture of Madness,” which likened psychiatry to the Spanish Inquisition, and Michel Foucault’s theory of mental illness as a socially constructed tool of state power.

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Persons: Rosenthal, Kennedy, Carl, Farley, —, Thomas Szasz ’, Michel Foucault’s Organizations: Research, Schizophrenia, N.I.M.H, “, Spanish