author
William Hirsch
A New York psychiatrist and neurologist, he wrote sharp, skeptical books that brought medical and psychological ideas into debates about religion, genius, and human behavior. His work gives a glimpse of late 19th- and early 20th-century attempts to explain big questions through science.
1 Audiobook
Genius and degeneration : A psychological study
by William Hirsch
About the author
Born in the late 1850s and active in New York, William Hirsch was an American psychiatrist and neurologist of Jewish background. He is remembered today chiefly for his nonfiction writing, especially books that applied psychiatric and psychological thinking to religion, creativity, and social life.
His best-known works include Genius and Degeneration: A Psychological Study and Religion and Civilization: The Conclusions of a Psychiatrist. In these books, he approached famous thinkers, belief, and culture with a clinical and often strongly critical eye, reflecting a period when psychiatry was expanding its influence beyond medicine into public intellectual life.
Hirsch died in New York City on February 14, 1937. Though not widely read now, his books remain of interest to listeners curious about the history of psychology, secular thought, and the bold arguments of earlier scientific writers.