The Anatomy of Madness: New Directions in the History of Psychiatry

Abstract

After decades of being one of the most polemical fields in medical history, the history of psychiatry has entered a peaceful and productive maturity. The long vexatious debates over the 'treatment-incarceration' dichotomy have subsided, to be replaced with more complex considerations of psychiatry and psychiatric institutions. In contrast to the sharply divided camps of proand anti-psychiatry that dominated historical discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, this 'post-Foucaultian' generation of historians lacks a set political agenda. Moreover, the once dominant focus on nineteenth-century psychiatrists and their asylums has broadened to include a more diverse range of topics from the early modern period