Madness: A Brief History

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, and 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. Roy Sydney Porter was born December 31, He grew up in a south London working class home.

His starred double first in history at Cambridge University led to a junior research fellowship at his college, Christ's, followed by a teaching post at Churchill College, Cambridge. He joined the Wellcome Institute fot the History of Medicine in where he was a Senior Lecturer from to , a Reader from to , and finally a Professor in the Social History of Medicine from to Porter was Elected a fellow of the British Academy in , and he was also made an honorary fellow by both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Roy Porter died March 4, , at the age of Medical historian Porter authoritatively traces how Western culture has explained and treated insanity. Holes bored in 7,year-old skulls indicate the earliest assessment of madness as spirit-possession. The ancient Greeks and medieval and Renaissance philosophers influenced by them replaced possession with irrationality as the cause of madness and exorcists with physicians as its curers. The Enlightenment stressed folly as the mark of madness; romanticism reacted by considering genius akin to madness.

Asylums arose to secure the insane for their own good, and newly emergent psychiatry developed several ostensibly successful asylum strategies. As asylums became overloaded with incurables, however, disillusionment induced underfunding. Freud and his spawn came to psychiatry's rescue, but madness persists despite a century of psychoanalysis and of listening increasingly to what the insane say about their conditions.

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New drugs quash symptoms but have undesirable side effects, including dependency. Meanwhile, the medical profession is divided about the legitimacy of psychiatry. No branch of medicine faces as much popular skepticism as psychiatry.

In this readable yet rigorous little book with a global slant, Porter social history of medicine, University Coll. A wealth of facts and literary references illuminate how people went from believing that supernatural forces cause mental illness to their reliance on more rational and naturalistic explanations, culminating in today's combination of the medical and psychosocial models. Porter also discusses topical issues, including the relationship between lunacy and creativity; the drive to institutionalize, which peaked in the midth century; the rise and demise of psychoanalysis; and the development of the antipsychiatry movement.

Project MUSE - Madness: A Brief History (review)

This book combines the appeal of history as narrative with the intellectual stimulation derived from cogent analysis. The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital, it will engage both general readers and psychiatry students with its sparkling prose and a well-annotated bibliography. Many first saw madness as caused by demons; then, with Christianity came the view that Satan fought with God for the souls of men, and that madness reflected Satan's victory. Madness, Gods, and Demons 3. The Rationality of Madness 4.

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Fools and Folly 5. Locking up the Mad 6. The Rise of Psychiatry 7. The Century of Psychoanalysis 9. Modern Times, Ancient Problems?

Madness : a brief history

He is the author of over 80 books, including Enlightenment: In between we get Greco-Roman rationalism, the bloody and persistent belief that mental illness was caused by a compromised faith in God approximately , 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!

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. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

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