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Madness - A Brief History (by R. Porter)
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| Added by: trzcina | Karma: 715.82 | Coursebooks | 11 July 2007 |
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Medical historian traces how Western culture has explained and treated insanity. Holes bored in 7,000-year-old skulls indicate the earliest assessment of madness as spirit-possession. The ancient Greeks and medieval and Renaissance philosophers influenced by them replaced possession with irrationality as the cause of madness and exorcists with physicians as its curers. The Enlightenment stressed folly as the mark of madness; romanticism reacted by considering genius akin to madness. Asylums arose to secure the insane for their own good, and newly emergent psychiatry developed several ostensibly successful asylum strategies. As asylums became overloaded with incurables...
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| Tags: madness, insane, about, their, Porter, possession, newly |
