Hello and welcome back to Hardcore Literature. This episode of Hardcore Literature might

touch upon some themes that some listeners may find distressing. We're talking about bibliotherapy.

Biblio from the Greek, Biblion, meaning book, and therapy, which means a course of treatment

intended to heal a disorder, either mental, psychological or physical.

And comes from the Greek, Theropeia, meaning healing and Theropoian, I can't speak Greek, meaning to administer or treat medically.

So, in weird, modern English, book healing or book treatment. The Oxford English

dictionary defines bibliotherapy nicely. The use of reading matter for therapeutic purposes in the

treatment of nervous disorders. It's quite interesting actually seeing when bibliotherapy as a word came

into common parlance, or at least when the word was formed, or the first instance of the word,

when do you think it was? Because, I mean, if you like me, when you first heard bibliotherapy,

you probably thought this was a new age, kind of woo-woo term that maybe came out in the last 10 years or so.

No, the first recorded instance of bibliotherapy is in 1920 in a book called The Haunted Book Shop.

It's a novel by Christopher Morley.

And, well, this is the line in which bibliotherapy was mentioned.

The young man had heard of none of these books prescribed by the practitioner of bibliotherapy.

And then the next recorded instance, or I think a later recorded instance, was in the US Veterans Medical Bulletin, some sort of journal, talking about bibliotherapy. In 1929, use of books

as form of treatment in neuropsychiatric hospital. That's 1929. Isn't that interesting? What was

happening around that time? I think you know you know so actually it's not a surprise

in these times of trouble and we're going through a bit of a crisis at the moment globally with the

covid thing um many other things we're we're at a sort of pain point historically speaking

and the last major pain point was probably the World Wars,

wasn't it? So, isn't that funny? So many people have emailed me to say that they've found the

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