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Madness : a Brief History by Porter, Roy is a health book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Madness : a Brief History about?

A history of "madness" offers readers a history of mental illness and its treatment. The book reveals radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day. The author explores what we really mean by 'madness', covering an enormous range of topics from electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, witches to creative geniuses, and psychoanalysis to Prozac. The origins of current debates about how we define and deal with insanity are examined through eyewitness accounts of writers, artists, those treating patients, and the mad themselves from holes drilled in five-thousand-year-old skulls to the latest in modern psychotropic drugs. 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 the author shows in this work, 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. Drawin

Who reads Madness : a Brief History?

Author

Porter, Roy

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press

Published

2002

Language

EN

ISBN

9780191587764

Category

health

Subjects

History, Medical, Science

Rating

3.47 / 5 (484 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13