• COVER: Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership - As he celebrates his 90th birthday, the world's greatest moral leader reflects on a lifetime of service • SOCIETY: The Truth About Plastic - It's in just about everything--which may be harmful to you and the planet. • ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT: Batman Is Back - The new Batman epic is a violent, masterly weave of madness and dread • TECHNOLOGY: Post Apocalypse - The Web needs commenters. But are they ruining the Net faster than they can save it?
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...
