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Madness A Brief History Roy Porter by Porter, Roy is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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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 Roy Porter shows in Madness: A Brief History, 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. Drawing upon eyewitness accounts of doctors, writers, artists, and the mad themselves, Roy Porter tells the story of our changing notions of insanity and of the treatments for mental illness that have been employed from antiquity to the present day. Beginning with 5,000-year-old skulls with tiny holes bored in them (to allow demons to escape), through conceptions of madness as an acute phase in the trial of souls, as an imbalance of "the humours," as the "divine fury" of creative genius, as sanity itself in a world gone mad, or as the malfunctioning of brain chemistry, Porter shows the many ways madness has been perceived and misperceived in every historical period. He also t

Who reads Madness A Brief History Roy Porter?

Author

Porter, Roy

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press

Published

2003

Language

EN

ISBN

9780191587764

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Medical, Psychology

Rating

3.47 / 5 (484 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14