Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors & Lunatics (Revealing History) Hardcover – January 1, 2004
Author: Visit Amazon's Roy Porter Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0752419722 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors & Lunatics – January 1, 2004
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Review
"The joy of this book lies in the colourful characters"
From the Publisher
What was it like to be insane in the Georgian England of Mary Wollstonecraft and Coleridge (himself afflicted with madness)? How were our eighteenth–century ancestors “sectioned” and how were they treated by the fledgling psychiatric “profession?” Indeed, how was the most famous mad person of the century—Shelley’s “old, mad, blind, despised king” George III—treated before his final descent into insanity in 1808?
The best–selling popular historian, Roy Porter, looks at the bizarre and savage practices used by doctors for treating those afflicted by “manias,” ranging from huge doses of opium, blood–letting and cold water immersion to beatings, confinement in cages and blistering. The author also reveals how Bethlem—the London asylum created to care for the mentally sick of the capital—was riddled with sadism and embezzlement, and if that wasn’t dehumanizing enough, jeering, ogling sightseers were permitted entry—for a fee of course.
Until his recent untimely death, Roy Porter was one of Britain’s most revered social historians. His other books include Enlightenment, London: A Social History and Quacks, also published by Tempus.
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Direct download links available for Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors & Lunatics (Revealing History) Hardcover – January 1, 2004
- Series: Revealing History
- Hardcover: 344 pages
- Publisher: Tempus; 1st Illustrated Edition edition (2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0752419722
- ISBN-13: 978-0752419725
- Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Roy Porter is mostly known for his books on the history of medicine and the development of medical practice in Europe. "Madmen" is Porter's attempt at outlining the changes in the care of "lunatics" (as the subtitle puts it), mostly during Georgian England. The book traces the different approaches to various mental illnesses from the time of humoralism up until the birth of what can be recognized as modern-day psychiatry in the early nineteenth century.
Porter begins by challenging Foucault's concept of the Great Confinement, in which unreasonable members of society were institutionalized in large numbers. According to Foucault, before the Great Confinement folly had "a liberty and truth of its own, engaging in a dialogue with reason" but afterwards became disqualified, abominated, and reduced to pure negation (unreason). Foucault also maintains that it was it mostly the poor who were institutionalized by the rising middle classes. Porter challenges this as historically inaccurate at least in England; instead, the progress was slow and gradual. Also, "it is a key contention for Foucault that the Great Confinement was driven by the powerful to police the poor ... but it would be a mistake to underestimate the numbers of bourgeois, gentry, and nobility who were also being confined" (p. 21).
Porter gives an historical account of the four-fold humoralism (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) as a way of explaining how rational, mortal men could attain balance with the cosmos; aetiologies of sickness were also explained as an imbalance between the humors well into the eighteenth century.
Having always found Roy Porter an interesting historian of Eighteenth Century England (see English Society in the Eighteenth Century and Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World), and enjoyed his one volume Social History of London, I looked forward to reading "Madness: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics". It is an attempt to synthesis the research that existed when it was written in 1987, and to craft a history of Madness for the period that stretches roughly from the Restoration to the Regency.
The book is split into four parts, the first surveys different cultural fields and looks at how perceptions of the mad changed over the period this survey is concerned with, essentially moving from a religious to secular outlook. The second part concerns the growing, but by no means monolithic, confinement of those deemed mad, how this occurred, the experiences of those locked away and the differing types of Asylums where this happened. Thirdly, Porter considers how the growth of ideas lead towards something that could formally be called psychiatry, though I thought that many of the ideas particularly regarding "melancholy" or depression, especially those culled from the writing of John Locke, were more relevant to psychology?
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