Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

London: W.M. Dawson & Sons Ltd, 1955. First British edition. First English-language edition. [xii], 416 pp. Bound in publisher's slick black cloth with gilt lettering. Near Fine with slightly foxed edges, former owner's bookplate on paste down, in Very Good dust jacket, torn near head with repairs to verso, slightly toned. A classic account of mental illness from the patient's perspective, first published in German in 1903. Current US publisher New York Review of Books describes it thusly: "In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. (truncated) In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a 'crisis in God's realm,' one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber 'considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman....'" It inspired a 2006 film. (Inventory #: 140943492)