Looking back on his confinement to Bethlem, Restoration playwright
Nathaniel Lee declared: "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and
damn them, they outvoted me." As Roy Porter shows in Madness: A Brief
History, thinking about who qualifies as insane, what causes mental
illness, and how such illness should be treated has varied wildly
throughout recorded history, sometimes veering dangerously close to the
arbitrariness Lee describes and often encompassing cures considerably
worse than the illness itself.
Drawing upon eyewitness accounts of doctors, writers, artists, and the
mad themselves, Roy Porter tells the story of our changing notions of
insanity and of the treatments for mental illness that have been
employed from antiquity to the present day. Beginning with
5,000-year-old skulls with tiny holes bored in them (to allow demons to
escape), through conceptions of madness as an acute phase in the trial
of souls, as an imbalance of "the humors," as the "divine fury" of
creative genius, or as the malfunctioning of brain chemistry, Porter
shows the many ways madness has been perceived and misperceived in every
historical period. He takes us on a fascinating round of treatments,
ranging from exorcism and therapeutic terror--including immersion in a
tub of eels--to the first asylums, shock therapy, the birth of
psychoanalysis, and the current use of psychotropic drugs.
Throughout, Madness: A Brief History offers a balanced view, showing
both the humane attempts to help the insane as well as the ridiculous
and often cruel misunderstanding that have bedeviled our efforts to heal
the mind of its myriad afflictions.
