The anatomy of madness: essays in the history of psychiatry, vol. 3, The asylum and its psychiatry

As Fontenelle observed in his eloge of Newton, the great man had not only not made his case, but had said of the unknown cause of gravity and its manifest effects precisely what the peripatetics said of occult qualities. These comments are offered as a gesture against the fad that ascribes to "magic" or "the magical tradition" whatever in the natural philosophy of the scientific revolution is not strictly mechanical in the Cartesian sense. Also, they are a plea that we historians use words with the meaning or meanings they had for the people in whose mouths we put them. Francesco Lana-Terzi, an elder contemporary of Hooke's and one of the great natural magicians of the seventeenth century, attacked those who ruined the good name of his speciality by working off as natural magic the nonsense, superstitions, and trivia of the ages. He had in mind among others Giambattista della Porta, a man of the sixteenth century, whom Henry takes as an examplar of the natural magician. In tying Hooke to the "natural-magical tradition", does Henry intend the doctrine according to Lana, or, closer to home, Bishop Wilkins? The distinction matters. Without it, one slides easily from engineering to conjuring. Though rightly resisting the temptation to see the history of psychiatry and the history of the asylum "as coterminous, indeed synonymous, with each other", (p. 1), the editors of this volume acknowledge that one cannot avoid recognizing the defining role played by the asylum in the rise of the psychiatric profession. This is, of course, especially true for the nineteenth century, the period attended to almost exclusively here, and the book's subtitle thus accurately reflects its contents. In fact, the boundaries are narrower than even this suggests: the papers gathered together here focus not so much on the impact on the profession and on society at large of the early nineteenth century image of the asylum as utopia, the panacea capable of banishing the scourge of madness; but rather on the implications of the collapse over the next half century of its pretensions to cure, and the associated rise of the barracks-asylum. Like the two preceding volumes in the series, the collection consists of hitherto unpublished work by some of the leading younger contributors to the field; and, again like its predecessors, despite some attention to developments elsewhere (Christine Stevenson on Danish responses to insanity; Waltraud Ernst on the treatment …