Volume 29, Number 20 · December 16, 1982
Madness
By Lawrence Stone
Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries
by D.P. Walker
University of Pennsylvania Press, 116 pp., $16.00
Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England
by Michael MacDonald
Cambridge University Press, 323 pp., $39.95
Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century
edited by Charles Webster
Cambridge University Press, 394 pp., $45.00
Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era
edited by Andrew Scull
University of Pennsylvania Press, 384 pp., $9.95 (paper)
During the last fifteen years, a series of semi-independent intellectual trends have come together to transform the history of what society has thought about madness and how it has treated those it considers mad. Once upon a time, the history of medicine was regarded, like that of pure science, as largely 'internalist,' a story of how a progressive endeavor by a handful of gifted intellectuals slowly replaced superstition and error by empirical proven truth. More recently, however, historians of both science and medicine have begun to fit the protagonists in these ancient intellectual battles more deeply into their social settings. In the process, they have revealed a welter of unproven pseudo-scientific theories, professional or national rivalries, institutional jealousies, personal and professional ambitions, cultural conditioning, sexist and racist prejudices, political exigencies, economic incentives to save money, and religious biases, out of which new and powerful scientific and medical paradigms have emerged.
Review, 6144 words
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