Sarah Chaney

As heard on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour A Blackwell's and Waterstones Best Popular Science Book of 2022 'Excellent ... one of those rare pop-science books that make you look at the whole world differently' The Daily Telegraph * 'Riveting' Mail on Sunday * 'Captivating' Guardian, Book of the Day 'Compelling' Observer Sarah Chaney takes us on an eye-opening and...

Self-harm is thought by many to be a modern epidemic: a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, a symptom of extreme emotional turmoil in young people, particularly young women. Yet it was 150 years ago, within early asylum psychiatry, that self-mutilation was first codified as a category of behaviour, and explanations for a variety of self-injurious acts were conceived very...

Before the nineteenth century, the term normal was rarely ever associated with human behaviour. Normal was a term used in maths, for right angles. People weren't normal; triangles were. But from the 1830s, this branch of science really took off across Europe and North America, with a proliferation of IQ tests, sex studies, a census of hallucinations—even a UK beauty...