Keepers

Andrew Scull

• Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency by Roy Porter
  Athlone, 412 pp, £25.00, August 1987, ISBN 0 485 11324 4
• The Past and the Present Revisited by Lawrence Stone
  Routledge, 440 pp, £19.95, October 1987, ISBN 0 7102 1253 4
• Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in 17th-Century England by Lucinda McCray Beier
  Routledge, 314 pp, £30.00, December 1987, ISBN 0 7102 1053 1
• Illness and Self in Society by Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, translated by Elborg Forster
  Johns Hopkins, 271 pp, £20.25, January 1988, ISBN 0 8018 3228 4
• Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780-1870 by Hilary Marland
  Cambridge, 503 pp, £40.00, September 1987, ISBN 0 521 32575 7
• A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane by Roy Porter
  Weidenfeld, 261 pp, £14.95, October 1987, ISBN 0 297 79223 7

For nearly two centuries now, the treatment of the mad in Georgian England has been almost uniformly portrayed in the darkest hues. Nineteenth-century lunacy reformers pictured the preceding age as mired in ignorance and cruelty, conjuring up indelible images of monstrous madhouse-keepers beating their patients into submission, chaining them up like wild beasts in foul holding-pens filled with shit, straw and stench; of the callous, jeering crowd – urban sophisticates and country bumpkins alike – thronging to Bedlam in their thousands to view the splendid entertainment offered by the spectacle of the raging and raving mad. Generations of Whiggish historians, celebrating the Victorian asylum as a triumph of science over superstition, the very embodiment of an aroused moral consciousness, sang variations on the same theme, seizing on the passage from the madhouse to the mental hospital as decisive evidence of our progress towards ever greater enlightenment and heaping opprobrium on the benighted denizens of an earlier age.