A History of Insanity from Antiquity to the Present Day
Publisher
:
Tallandier
Parution date
:
2009
EAN
:
9782847346039
Number of pages
:
619
Description
In 1963, in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Michel Foucault postulated, and most of the world came to agree, that madness as we now understand it was codified in the Age of Reason as the reverse of reason—and an excuse to exclude people from society. In this detailed study, Claude Quétel, the author of The History of Syphilis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), throws fresh light on the many ways insanity has been diagnosed, treated, and perceived throughout history.
Quétel, a historian and specialist in the history of psychiatric imprisonment, did exhaustive research. Going beyond Foucault, he shows that the “modern” concept of madness and its treatment did not begin in the mid-1600s but has been in existence for much longer.
Quétel notes that the ancient Greeks—Hippocrates and Celsus—described insanity as an “illness of the soul” and suggested treatment that did not require exclusion from society: soothing baths, leeches, and cold, wet sponges. Quétel goes on to consider why insanity came to be perceived as a problem for the state rather than for the individual; he also explores its accepted definitions and society’s moral, social, medical, and penal responses.
Quétel shows in this illuminating, new, and thoroughly accessible study that there are other ways of looking at the history of mental illness than through Foucault’s prism alone.
Author
Claude Quétel : Claude Quétel is the former director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and a renowned historian and specialist in the history of psychiatric imprisonment. He cowrote Nouvelle Histoire de la Psychiatrie (Éditions Privat, 1983; republished by Dunod in 1994 and 2004). He is the author of several books on medicine, including Histoire de la syphilis (Seghers, 1986; The History of Syphilis, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and On the Old Regime; he also wrote De par le Roy, essai sur les lettres de Chachet (Privat, 1981) and L’histoire véritable de la Bastille (Larousse, 2006).
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