Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England
- Jonathan Andrews &
- Andrew Scull
University of California Press: 2001. 386 pp. $35, £24.95
Psychiatry in the eighteenth century used to be regarded as the heart of darkness. The age of holy madness, as seen by medieval Christendom, and that of wise fools in Renaissance theatre, had gone, and the humanitarian reform of the nineteenth century was yet to come. Historians of various, often opposite, inclinations condemned eighteenth-century madhouses and mad-doctors (as psychiatrists were then called). Only with Roy Porter's ground-breaking book Mind-forg'd Manacles (Athlone, 1987) did historians begin to see psychiatry in the eighteenth century in a different light. Since then, several key publications, the most notable of which is R. A. Houston's Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2000), have shown that Porter's emphasis on diversity and dynamism in eighteenth-century psychiatry is essentially correct. Psychiatric modernity, with both its positive and negative aspects, was established — or at least was being gestated — in the period of the Enlightenment. On the positive side, humane attitudes towards the patients and psychological understanding of mental diseases were being formulated in the upper and middle classes. On the negative side, the threat posed by psychiatry to the principle of individual liberty was clearly recognized, thanks to some well-publicized scandals. Both the triumph and shame of psychiatric modernity were present in eighteenth-century Britain.
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