"It's fantastic Netflix have chosen to do a series like The
Alienist, which shows the origins of techniques like fingerprinting and criminal profiling and puts scientists like Faulds back in the limelight."
A lurid cross between Scorsese's Gangs of New York and Exorcist 3 - the one where George C Scott's detective invstigates a spate of ritualistc killings in Washington's Georgtown neighbourhood - The
Alienist set its claret-stained, syphalitic stall out early and didn't let up.
The
Alienist is based on the novel of the same name by Caleb Carr.
Take the instance of an
alienist, your honor, when he is put on the stand.
Thus, the term "
alienist" is used, quite appropriately, when referring to the nineteenth century, rather than "psychiatrist," its twentieth-century replacement.
Though the Duval stories take place in the 1970s and 1980s, the books in his second series, Les Cahiers noirs de l'alieniste (Black notebooks of the
alienist), take place almost a hundred years earlier--the first, Dans le quartier des agites, in Paris, 1889; the second, Le Sang des prairies, in Fort Edmonton, 1885; and the most recent, Et a l'heure de votre mort, in Montreal, 1894.
"Gerard de Nerval was not an
alienist, but unfortunately for him he was quite mad and in order to talk about madness, had only to look inside himself; it was enough for him to exhibit his intimate impressions without preconceptions or ideas borrowed from someone else." (Moreau 1859: 430)
Europe has followed but tardily; Freud, the Austrian
Alienist, has been a notable exception to the self-sufficiency of that effete continent, which was only beginning to discover the American school, when the war broke out and threw that continent back for decades.
In his work, published in The
Alienist and Neurologist, Dr.
* affidavits from two medical practitioners, one of whom shall be an '
alienist'.
The book I chose was "The
Alienist," by Caleb Carr.