Primitive Madness: Re-Writing the History of Mental Illness and Race

Abstract

In the view of most historians of psychiatry, knowledge about mental illness is textured by the social and political context in which it arises. Gerald Grob, arguably the doyen of the field, has made this point on a number of occasions, cheerfully reciting Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1860 observation that “‘[t]heoretically [medicine] ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path, without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public opinion. But…[there is] a closer relation between the Medical Sciences and the conditions of Society and the general thought of the time, than would at first be suspected.’”1 Important works by the likes of Elaine Showalter (gender), Elizabeth Lunbeck (gender), Paul Lerner (class), and Jonathan Metzl (culture), have extended the point, showing how social factors have shaped and directed knowledge about the mind and its disorders. Missing from this large body of work, however, is any consideration of how race has affected the creation of psychiatric knowledge, or shaped the application of that knowledge.