Long before the age of reliable pschodiagnosis, a primitive vocabulary sprang up to address odd and unconventional people within society. Thw history of psychiatry concerns efforts to identify, diagnose, and contain or treat these `wild, ' `mad' or `insane' people. The history is organized chronologically and by country until the twentieth century when it is arranged by decade and major fields, in-cluding epidemiology, psychoanalysis, biological psychiatry, child psychiatry and philosophy as it relates to the mind. Michael Stone begins with a look at the role of religion in healing the mind and ends with some tentative predictions about the practice of psychiatry in the twenty-first century. He brings tremendous scholarship, vision and appreciation for detail to this comprehensive history of psychiatry.