Madness: A Brief History

by Roy Porter

Overview

This fascinating story of madness reveals the radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day. Roy Porter explores what we really mean by 'madness', covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac. The origins of current debates about how we define and deal with insanity are examined through eyewitness accounts of those treating patients, writers, artists, and the mad themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191622281
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	03/13/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

The most highly-acclaimed and prolific medical historian of this generation. Roy Porter was a well-known and widely respected author of over 80 books, the most recent being the much reviewed Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Penguin, 2000). He published extensively in the history of psychiatry, including A Social History of Madness (Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 1987; Paperback edition, 1989); The Faber Book of Madness (Faber, 1991; paperback 1993). He was Professor of the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London; and had extensive experience of popular public lecturing, broadcasting, and serious journalism.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Madness, Gods, and Demons
3. The Rationality of Madness
4. Fools and Folly
5. Locking up the Mad
6. The Rise of Psychiatry
7. The Mad
8. The Century of Psychoanalysis
9. Conclusion: Modern Times, Ancient Problems?

Editorial Reviews

"A brief and fascinating history of insanity."--Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In just over 200 pages Porter manages to cram in everything from 7,000-year-old skulls with holes bored into them to release demons to the rise of psychopharmacology. In between we get Greco-Roman rationalism, the bloody and persistent belief that mental illness was caused by a compromised faith in God (approximately 200,000 witches killed), the rebirth of the humors (blood, choler, melancholy, and--my favorite--phlegm), institutionalization, Freudian analysis, de-institutionalization, the death of Freudian analysis (to your computers, Cambridge analysts!), and the glorification of insanity under Michel Foucault. It's a rich history, and because of Porter's delightful habit of bringing in colorful figures to fill out the story, his book seems bright even when walking the dingy halls of Bedlam."--Sunday Boston Globe

"The sudden and unexpected death of Roy Porter in March robbed the English-speaking world of one of its most prolific, colorful and talented social historians.... Madness...displays several of his virtues: his wide reading, his prodigious memory, his extraordinary capacity for synthesis, his eye for an anecdote, and the sheer fun he took in telling a story."--Nature

"A magisterial synthesis of 1,000 years of mental illness and psychiatric remedies. The book wears its learning so lightly that in an afternoon's perusal, the average reader has a genuinely informed account of what all the shouting has been about."--Toronto Globe and Mail

"This small book is rich in detail yet never loses sight of the broader ebb and flow in society's beliefs about what constitutes mental illness."--Houston Chronicle

From the Publisher