Mad People's History

Abstract

The comments by a mad person shunned during his lifetime and the thoughts of an undergraduate student reading his words two hundred years later offer a perfect example of how mad people can open eyes and minds to new learning experiences that are both intellectually stimulating and socially responsible toward some of the most discriminated against members of society, past and present.1 This course is all about breaking the silences that William Belcher, and so many other mad people, endured and attempted to break while they were alive, and which later generations have an obligation to continue to break when teaching the history of madness. The history of psychiatry has traditionally been analyzed from the perspectives of doctors and policy makers. Even critical studies, such as Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) or David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum (1971), while seminal interpretations in their own right, give no serious attention to the voices of mad people who make up the background to their studies.2 A few books devoted exclusively to the perspectives and experiences of mad people have been written by Dale Peterson and Roy Porter.3 However, for the most part, his-