Mad Person Research Articles

Violence, intimacy and veins of madness in a fraught border city

AbstractThis article considers the intimate, the violent and the psychopathological in Bukavu, an eastern Congolese border city known for rape and war. A phenomenological focus pries open tensions in this ruinous, neoliberal ‘boom town’, frictions related to mental health, patterns of resort, and derangement. Ethnographic portraits from co-produced fieldnotes reveal family and street dynamics and a few adaptive, public figures of madness. Bukavu knows unhinged, delirious, psychotic people and PTSD infrastructures in this ‘trauma zone’. Patterns of psychosis go with ‘vivacity’, a Foucauldian word. The non-scientific term madness points to politics and the everyday, with many mad persons roaming the streets with performances. Intimacy enables rethinking this city, where ways of telling and knowing madness speak to agitation, kinship, strangeness and ordinary matters of sleep, dress and faecal matter.

Spiritual Pawning: “Mad Slaves” and Mental Healing in Atlantic-Era West Africa

AbstractWhen enslaved people became “mad,” they lost exchange value as labor capital on the Atlantic market, as neither African nor European merchants considered the mentally distressed to be valuable bondsmen. Historians of slavery in the Americas have drawn on accounts of “mad slaves” to understand how labor value was generated, and disrupted, through the transport and sale of captive Africans. But historians have yet to examine the relationship between psychological distress and enslavement in West Africa, where many of the captives in question originated. This article opens a research agenda on madness in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gold Coast, today’s coastal Ghana. Ga families confided their mentally distressed kin to shrine priests, who treated severe illnesses caused by ritual afflictions. When shrine priests healed these ailments, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, deemed unfit for sale due to mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. West African shrines were thus spaces of value conversion that reflected a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and raiding that proliferated on the Gold Coast.

The Othering of Women by the Otherised: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as the Voice of the Voiceless

Some works of art are a kind of term analysing products. By reading or examining them we can have an idea about the era they were created in. In this context, Jean Rhys, in her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea, gives very detailed information about Creole women’s life and mishaps they lived. Indeed, we can read this novel as a premise of Charlotte Brontee’s Jane Eyre. There is a Creole character named as Bertha Mason, namely the woman in the attic. Jean Rhys, as a Creole herself, looks for the reasons of imprisonment of Bertha Mason to the attic. Although she is a white woman she is condemned to the attic in her husband Mr. Rochester’s house. Of course the time Bertha Mason lived in, the puritanic life style was dominant, yet there is not any link between her imprisonment and it. Bertha, as a Creole, could not gain admission in English society due to not being full-blooded white. Because of this, she is neither English nor slave. Because of being a post-colonial work, reader can see the clash between ‘black and white negros’. Here, ‘the white niggers’ are Creoles who had slaves and lands lang syne. We can analyse Wide Sargasso Sea from many perspectives, yet to me the most important one is the othering of others by otherised people. The othering layer is Creoles and specifically women, the otherised are blacks, and the others in this study are also blacks but then men. I will not discriminate between black or white men. In this study I will examine the othering of women in English society eventhough the Kingdom is governed by a Queen in that time. I will touch the reasons that compel women to stay at home and, if they are not full-blooded white, to the attics like a mad person. And also, I will try to scrutinize the causes of maddening of woman in that era.

Respectfully distrusting ‘Students as Partners’ practice in higher education: applying a Mad politics of partnership

ABSTRACTAs a Mad person affiliated with Mad/psychiatric survivor/disability movements, participating in pedagogical partnerships over the past four years has been confusing and ethically fraught. Through engagement with the scholarship on Students as Partners (SaP) practice in higher education, the emerging discipline of Mad(ness) Studies, and my own experiences as a ‘partner’ on various projects, this paper seeks to synthesize a Mad politics of student-staff partnership in the academy. These politics are explored through four themes: (1) Equity? Attention to power dynamics and resulting trauma; (2) Interpersonal concord and consensus? Anger, conflict and collective action; (3) Mutual collaboration? Independence and survivor-led/controlled initiatives; (4) Inclusion? Partnership barriers and possibilities for Mad/disabled students. I end by proposing a politics of respectful distrust as Mad Studies and Mad/disabled people further explore opportunities for coalition-building and alliance with SaP colleagues.

Madness as Ecological Consciousness in Bole Butake’s Lake God and John Nkengasong’s Black Caps and Red Feathers

This paper seeks to demonstrate that madness is not perceived in its strict sense but it can equally stand for ecological sensitization as indicated by Butake and Nkengasong’s dramaturgy. The plays of these playwrights indicate that environmental advocacy is a strange phenomenon in the universe and is welcomed by a few persons in the community who are regarded as strange beings in the midst of destructive and domineering humans. The paper argues that modernity and technological development have blinded humanity to an extent that anyone who still holds to environmental conservation is seen as a mad person. Madness is a complex word and the root cause of stigmatization, whose existence and concreteness can be seen in its interpretation. Its paradox lies in its existence or complexities when analyzed. According to Sueellen Campbell, madness is an aspect of the society which humans do not want to accept. Wild, on her part, sees madness as the strange behaviour or frenzy state in man. Madness exposes some realities of man’s true self which he does not want to acknowledge in his life/ society. The methodology adopted for this paper is a comparative and an analytical study of the texts. The article is predicated on the hypothesis that madness is not often regarded in its pure state but often incubates a certain reality when analysed.
 The theoretical framework used for the analysis of this paper is ecocriticism that addresses the question of ecological consciousness. Ecocriticism is a theory of literary criticism that studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment as defined by Glotfelty Cheryll and it is relevant in treating the issues discussed here. This work is based on Sueellen Campbell’s tenet which holds: “From the Middle Ages on, in different ways at different times, we have called mad what we do not want to acknowledge in ourselves, what we do not want to acknowledge in our society […]” Glotfelty & Fromm, 128). It considers madness as a means of societal escapism from environmental truth. Campbell’s view is of interest as he evokes the term madness which is in light with the objective of the paper. Only abnormal people dodge from societal obligations and stigmatise the just as they are called mad. The conclusion arrived at is that environmental protection is still observed by a handful of persons as a reality. Humans have a long way to go and need sensitization talks in order for it to be understood. Those interested in ecological conservation are termed mad and end up with name calling/ stigmatized as mad.

Shipping Fools: Foucault’s Wandering Madman and Civic Responsibility in Late Medieval Germany

Abstract Few aspects of Michel Foucault’s seminal study The History of Madness have been more widely derided and debunked than Foucault’s assertion that medieval mad persons sailed the rivers of Europe as a kind of real-world counterpart to the literary and artistic trope of the ship of fools. But while Foucault was not correct in many of his assumptions, he also was not entirely wrong to draw attention to the river. Based on archival research in Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, this article offers a critical insight into how some medieval cities managed their problematic mad. In particular, it uncovers the widespread and little-understood practice of expelling the mad from late medieval German towns. It argues that the practice of expulsion was multilayered, ranging from relatively benign trips to convey a mad person back home, to official banishments of criminal mad men and women. It finds that most of the expelled mad, however, were simply sent away, out of the city walls and away from municipal responsibility. These expulsions appear frequently in fifteenth-century records and reveal that one particular kind of route was preferred by cities in Southern Germany: the river. In fact, municipal leaders routinely used the Danube, the Isar, and the Main rivers as the best way to rid their towns of difficult or friendless mad persons. While such river journeys did not take place on “ships of fools,” the river was thus a critical and meaningful part of the geographic and cultural landscapes of madness.

Bookkeeping madness. Archives and filing between court and ward

ABSTRACTThe paper reconstructs the invention of the loose file system in German psychiatry in the early nineteenth century as a special case of medical and juridical relationship. The loose file allows the gathering of all information of the treatment of the respective patient in one folder, which enables it to be reordered for the different ways of reimbursing care, providing cure, and to store the patient’s file for re-use in the case of re-admission. Psychiatry was the first discipline to introduce the new filing system. The reason for this was not, I argue, a medical one. Legislation and juridical debates about the status of the mentally ill person prompted a new admission procedure. The new Prussian General Law Code required a formal ‘declaration of lunacy’ which was negotiated in a regular trial. ‘Lunatics and raving mad persons’ came under the ‘special supervision and preventative care of the state’. The legal procedure produced questionnaires, reports and protocols which drove the patient-related record keeping in the psychiatric departments.

Mobilizing Dis/Ability Research: A Critical Discussion of Qualitative Go-Along Interviews in Practice

In this article, I document the challenges of operationalizing critical qualitative mobile research methods, specifically go-along interviews. Mobility-oriented qualitative inquiry is a way to examine disabled and Mad persons’ socio-spatial knowledges and study spatial inequalities impacting these persons. I reflect on my own positionality as an able-bodied researcher, while conducting research with self-identifying Mad and disabled research participants. I further discuss the limitations, enabling factors, constraints, and implications of engaging in go-along interviews. Next, I unpack how and why this method at many times was not desired by my research participants in favor of more traditional interview techniques, such as sit-down face-to-face interviews. There is a need to critically (re)consider space and place in research practices in ways that value the often subjugated voices and socio-spatial knowledge(s) of Mad and disabled persons.

“That proves you mad, because you know it not”: impaired insight and the dilemma of governing psychiatric patients as legal subjects

This article investigates “impaired insight,” a controversial psychiatric category describing a mad person unable to know his or her madness. Like “moral insanity” and other concepts before it, impaired insight offers a way to link the disparate logics of human responsibility in psychiatry and the law. I attribute its development to changes wrought by deinstitutionalization, the rise of antipsychotic medication, and patient incarceration in penal settings. In a system that aims to govern psychiatric patients through their freedom, the logic of impaired insight introduces a wrinkle: can a person make an informed choice to refuse treatment if madness itself impairs awareness of illness? Drawing on tools from the sociology of science, I trace the process by which researchers recast psychodynamic “denial” as a neurological and therefore non-volitional “impairment” in the 1990s. I then show how social movement actors mobilized the materialized form in the legal and policy fields in the 2000s, bringing insight science to bear upon the very questions of custodial management and patient rights that gave birth to it. At stake is this dilemma: how can societies that simultaneously privilege individual responsibility and somatic accounts of behavior govern those at the border of legal capacity, and with what justification?

THE NAME OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN AS THE PRECEDENT LEXICAL ITEM IN ANTHONY BURGESS’S NOVEL “A CLOCKWORK ORANGE”

The article analyzes features of the proper name of Ludwig van Beethoven as well as represents its intentional use in the process of verbalization of the phenomenon “Music” (based on the novel “A Clockwork” by Orange A. Burgess). On the basis of a stage-by-stage research three models of the proper name Ludwig van Beethoven within the anthroponomical field of the literary discourse of A. Burgess were allocated: MODEL I [Personal name]; MODEL II [Surname]; MODEL III [Surname + Work of Art]. The use of the model [Personal name] – Ludwig van is prepotent and reflects the main character’s personal attitude towards the composer. Functional meanings of the proper name are defined, 4 lexical portraits of Beethoven are allocated: physiological, psychological, emotional and intellectual. Positive and negative signs of Beethoven are expressed by means of evaluative lexicon and antinomies in the analyzed novel. The positive characteristic of the composer prevails, which is connected with the greatness of his figure and is motivated by the main character’s affection to Beethoven. Beethoven’s educational, noble features belong to positive signs. Negative signs of the composer’s personality are reflected in his emotional and intellectual portraits as he is represented as a gloomy, angry, mad person. In Anthony Burgess’s novel “A Clockwork Orange” both universal and specific features of Ludwig van Beethoven are represented. The universal features include physical characteristics of the musician (deafness, long flying hair, etc.), and also recognition of genius of the composer and his creations. Beethoven’s character belongs to the sphere of universal and specific features. The fact of the detached, lonely lifestyle of the musician, his severe, gloomy character, which was caused by his disease, is wellknown. Annoyance, rage, hidden threat, penetrating look are the specific features which are allocated to Beethoven by the author of the novel A. Burgess.

Mental Illness as a Factor in the Creation of the Contemporary Romantic

The paper discusses the image of a mad person in the movie Donnie Darko by Richard Kelly. I want to examine the deranged protagonist as a contemporary Romantic by comparing Donnie Darko’s features and his approach to society with concepts espoused by Romanticism. The focus is on schizophrenia as a condition that influences Donnie’s perception, providing typical symptoms displayed by the protagonist (thought disturbance, various types of delusion or hallucination, acts of antisocial behaviour) as well as problems in information processing. I argue that it is Donnie’s condition that makes him a contemporary Romantic – he sees more, feels more and, in the end, he trusts intuition and emotions rather than rational explanation. The eponymous character is a young, alienated idealist who believes that the world can be changed. Donnie refuses to accept social norms or rules as an exceptional and rebellious outsider in search of the meaning of life. Eventually, the Romantic fascination with freedom and nature corresponds to the perception of the illness as liberation of one’s true nature.

Toward Epistemic Justice: A Critically Reflexive Examination of ‘Sanism’ and Implications for Knowledge Generation

The dominance of medicalized “psy” discourses in the West has marginalized alternative perspectives and analyses of madness, resulting in the under-inclusion (or exclusion) from mainstream discourse of the firsthand experiences and perspectives of those who identify as Mad. We argue that this marginalization of firsthand knowledge(s) demands closer critical scrutiny, particularly through the use of critical reflexivity. This paper draws on Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, whereby a person is wronged in his or her capacity as a knower, as a useful framework for interrogating the subjugation of Mad knowledge(s). Also examined is the problem of sanism, a deeply embedded system of discrimination and oppression, as an underlying component of epistemic injustice. Sanism assumes a pathological view of madness, which can be attributed to what Rimke has termed psychocentrism: the notion that pathologies are rooted in the mind and/or body of the individual, rather than the product of social structures, relations, and problems. The paper examines how sanism marginalizes the knowledge(s) of Mad persons and contributes to epistemic injustice, and considers possibilities for advancing social justice using Mad epistemological perspectives

The Nigerian home video boom: Should Nigerian psychiatrists be worried? Lessons from content review and views of community dwellers

Media depiction of sufferers of mental illness is a widely viewed source of stigmatization and studies have found stigmatizing depictions of mental illness in Nigerian films. With the recent boom in the Nigerian home video industry, there is a need to know how often Nigerians are exposed to films that contain scenes depicting mental illness and how much premium they place on such portrayals as reflecting reality. To assess the popularity of Nigerian home videos among Nigerian community dwellers and the frequency of their exposure to scenes depicting mental illness. A semi-structured questionnaire was designed to obtain socio-demographic data and to find out how often respondents see scenes depicting 'madness' in home videos, as well as their views about the accuracy of such depictions from the orthodox psychiatry point of view. Current home videos available in video rental shops were selected for viewing and content review. All 676 respondents had seen a Nigerian home video in the preceding 30 days: 528 (78%) reported scenes depicting 'mad persons'; 472 (70%) reported that the scenes they saw agreed with their own initial understanding of the cause and treatment of 'madness'. About 20% of the films depicted mental illness. The most commonly depicted cause was sorcery and enchantment by witches and wizards, while the most commonly depicted treatment was magical and spiritual healing by diviners and religious priests. Nigerian home video is a popular electronic media in Nigeria and scenes depicting mental illness are not uncommon. The industry could be harnessed for promoting mental health literacy.

A "secreta fundação" da psiquiatria: considerações sobre a análise foucaultiana da história da loucura

O artigo que ora se apresenta reflete sobre a História da loucura, texto que dá início às análises histórico-arqueológicas de Michel Foucault. A partir de um recorte temporal, que abrange o período compreendido entre a Renascença e a Modernidade, Foucault examina as distintas formas de percepção do louco até a instituição da loucura como doença mental. Uma "arqueologia do silêncio" à que se submete a loucura, não uma história da psquiatria, o texto foucaultiano indaga sobre as condições históricas que favorecem o surgimento da psiquiatria como discurso científico sobre a loucura e a instituição do asilo como lugar de tratamento do louco.

Out in Africa: Queer Desire in Some Anthropological and Literary Texts

We need to criss-cross queer theory with postcoloniality, in order to examine the phenomenon of those who are ‘out in Africa’. To date there have been only embryonic attempts to consider the literary representation of same-sex desire in a pan-African context.2 What is more, we lack a comparative approach to queer studies of African literatures, for research remains split between anglophone and francophone, let alone lusophone, studies, patterned on the colonial carving up of the African continent. Research has also privileged the colonial over the postcolonial period and male over female intimacies.3 It has therefore become crucial to identify those literary texts that present, in a subterranean way, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. I have therefore attempted to place my analysis in the historical context of the dominant anthropological discourse and to sketch out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female samesex desire in the novel while confining my scope to sub-Saharan Africa, even if Islamic homosexualities in the Maghreb and the Mashreq need to be addressed as well.4 Homosexuality is still thought to be not only ‘un-African’ but also a highly suspicious import from the deviant West. As a case in point, in the wake of the trial for sodomy of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in his 2002 electioneering speech as ‘mad person[s]’ who will be sent to jail: ‘we don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country [Zimbabwe], we have our own culture, our own people’.5 Whereas Dennis Altman contended

La différence: condition of exclusion or of reconnaissance?

From the Middle Ages onto the 19th century, following the trend set in leper hospitals, madness was to be hidden, secluded in dark places, far away from the mainstream of society. The emergence of the mad person, perceived as inevitably different, allows to make the boundaries between reason and folly, between human and inhuman, irrelevant. If leper hospitals have almost emptied out, if there are much fewer confinement facilities, the values and images related to the leper or the mad person, as well as the sense of exclusion, continue to persist. The purpose of this paper is to show clearly that this matter of exclusion is a serious legacy that could very well apply nowadays to other figures that, each in their own way, symbolize menace or mockery. It applies notably to the aged and the dying who both appear as the opposite of modern society and its values of efficiency, productivity and profitability. The multiplication of places where old people are left to die, and the elderly who are crowded in old folks homes, stand as proof of their exclusion from society. Nevertheless, youth and old age coexist, as well as life and death. If care of others is the trait of a humane civilization, must it be understood that barbarism consists in ignoring its own humanity as well as that of others? In view of such practices of exclusion, policy statements based on recognition of human dignity, where ethical obligation rests on recognition of others and humanism, are rather paradoxical. Is this a paradox or a deadlock; a condition of exclusion or of reconnaissance?

Madness, Memory, Time, and Space: The Eminent Psychological Physician and the Unnamed Artist – Patient

In this paper I explore the geography in the ideas of one 19th-century psychological physician, Thomas Laycock, seeking to show how his understanding of ‘madness’ rested upon an ‘imaginative historical geography’ that explained the contents of a mad person's consciousness as reversions to the mental worlds of other peoples living in other periods and places. I reconstruct Laycock's ideas about memory, notably what he understood by ‘ancestral memory’ rooted in ancestral times and spaces, and I relate these ideas to his deeper conceptualisations of the time – space fabric of creation. I also examine Laycock's approach to the letters and drawings of one unnamed artist – patient, showing that it is possible from other sources to give this patient a name (William James Blacklock) and even a ‘voice’ of sorts; and I suggest that Laycock was guilty of failing to engage properly with this evidence, yet also of overinterpreting it at the same time. Acknowledging the dangers of ‘presentism’ in this paper, I critique how Laycock's ideas captured ‘otherness’ in a grid of ‘sameness’ largely indifferent to the very different, perhaps unknowable, imaginings present in madness (and in all who depart from established norms). My contribution should be taken as a circumspect effort to write a ‘critical and effective history’ inspired by Foucault's claims in the introduction to The Order of Things (1970, Tavistock Publications, London) about the relationship between ‘the Same and the Other’.

Nas “entrelinhas” da história: sensibilidade e exclusão em narrativas da loucura

This article briefly discusses the legitimacy of search for sensitivities of a past time in literary sources – in this case, in narratives on madness. The mad persons themselves tell us their stories, expresses their sensitivity about their illness, about the environment that involves and excludes them and about the world where they live in. Three literary works about madness and admission in psychiatric hospitals illustrate these issues. Key words: sensitivity, cultural history, madness, social exclusion, psychiatric hospitals, literary narrative.

Mad People's History

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-

Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture Julie Robin Solomon Carol Thomas Neely . Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xv + 244 pp. Ill. $52.50, £30.50 (cloth, 0-8014-4205-2); $21.95, £12.50 (paperbound, 0-8014-8924-5). Madness—as both medical category and dramatic icon—was heterogeneous, proliferating, gender-inflected, internally divided, and blurry around the scientific and cultural edges. This is a major contention of Carol Thomas Neely's study of the ways in which English doctors, dramatists, and other writers represented mental illness between 1576 and 1632. Neely claims that English playwrights reflected current and humane medical ideas about madness and its cure, made use of them for their own dramatic purposes, and, in certain instances, anticipated the less-humane attitudes of the eighteenth century. She also uses this book to argue against what she sees as an unfortunate historical misconception: the "myth" (p. 199) that before 1632 visitors to Bethlehem (or Bethlem) Hospital, London's refuge for impoverished mad persons, came in order to witness its comic spectacle. She begins her work in 1576 because that is the date for the opening of the first public theater in London. Less convincing is her choice of 1632, the year when the administration of Bethlehem Hospital completely reverted to the City (as opposed to the Crown), as her study's endpoint: why not end with the closing of the theaters in 1642? In her introduction, Neely contends that her researches counter Michel Foucault's claim that the early modern period represented a period of "expressive madness" (p. 9) that ended when a mid-seventeenth epistemic break inaugurated the suppressing, silencing, and isolation of the mad. To the contrary, she finds in the writings of seventeenth-century physicians and dramatists abundant evidence that distracted persons were not isolated, mistreated, or confined, but rather humored and cared for with kindness. Restraints or confinement in a hospital like Bethlem were thought of as temporary measures that would lead to eventual cure. While rejecting this Foucauldian notion of a radical epistemic break, Neely also distances herself from those social historians who "assume that medical theory and practice remain[ed] static from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration" (p. 8): instead, she sees "gradual shifts" (p. 8) in the medical categorization and treatment of distracted persons between 1576 and 1632. She thus finds common cause with Ian Hacking's notion of "the secularization of the soul" (p. 2)—the idea that, since the Middle Ages, Western culture has increasingly sought natural and material explanations for the ills of the mind and soul rather than supernatural and spiritual ones. One consequence of these explanatory shifts, claims Neely, is the proliferation of new categories of mental illness, as well as the regendering of certain varieties of psychic disease. After the introduction the book is divided into six chapters, some more, some less interconnected. In chapter 1 Neely considers the nature and dramatic influence of sixteenth-century representations of madpersons on the English stage, beginning with the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle and the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy. In chapter 2 she examines the development of a particular [End Page 576] dramatic language of stage madness—made up of proverbs, fragments, rhymes, songs—in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. Here, she also shows how dramatic distinctions between feigned and real madness, supernatural and natural madness, and male and female forms of madness help to create depth and complexity of dramatic character as well as contributing to the cultural secularization of the soul. In chapter 3 Neely offers a nuanced reading of the emergence of the psychological category of female melancholy out of the early rubrics of male melancholy and uterine disorders such as suffocation of the mother. Chapter 4 extends the insights of chapter 3 to examine another emergent mental disorder, known as "lovesickness" in the works of Shakespeare and the paintings of Jan Steen. Neely argues in chapter 5 that three Shakespeare comedies—The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night—represent new, harsher attitudes toward the treatment...