Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade

With the rise of professionals in madness during the 19th-century, the trade in lunacy flourished. Masters of Bedlam describes both how these ""mad-doctors"" slowly developed into the psychiatrists of today and the evolution of treatment of the insane. The authors explain how in the early part of the century, rich lunatics were sent to well-appointed asylums, the rest to pauper madhouses run by the state. Most of the book is devoted to several eminent practitioners who represent crucial phases in the growth of the profession. John Haslam (1764-1844), superintendent of England's infamous Bethlem asylum, wrote tracts that preached gentleness of manner while the inmates were kept half naked and chained to the wall. John Conolly began by opposing the incarceration of lunatics and ended by urging the institutionalization of broad classes of people, including ""the morally perverse and socially inadequate."" The Scots, W.A.F. Browne and Alexander Morison, called themselves alienists and accepted phrenology as external evidence of brain disorder and in the 1850s, John Charles Bucknill wrote the first textbook on insanity with facial drawings of the five basic types. Finally, Henry Maudsley attributed ""morbid degeneration"" to an evil heredity and warned women to attend to ""the periodical tides of her organization"" or risk chorea, epilepsy and nervous disorders. By the end of this bizarre history, the ambiguity of the term ""mad-doctors"" becomes clear, and one wonders who the truly insane were. (Jan.)