Who Kept the Mad

Before there were asylums, somebody still had to hold the mad. Three societies answered that question differently, and none of them was a rung on a ladder.

A course on the thought of Custody.

Psychology · Medicine

What you will learn

Describe what a seventeenth-century medical day-book actually recorded.
Explain why the mad and the physically ill appear in one undifferentiated sequence.
Estimate the scale of a single unlicensed practice.
Explain why natural, astrological and demonic causes were not rivals in 1620.
Describe what Napier risked by practising angelic magic.
Identify what later destroyed the eclectic system.
Identify who actually held custody of the mad before the asylum.
Explain why family care was not an isolated or private arrangement.

Course outline

One Morning in April 1620 — An astrologer-parson in Buckinghamshire kept a day-book. On one ordinary Tuesday it records a woman with a running pain, a scholar who had thought himself sick, and a couple who were both unhappy…
Stars, Humours, and a Demon at Once — The same parson who prescribed purges also conjured an archangel, and the archangel was wrong about the plague. Neither fact embarrassed him, because the three explanations he had available were not…
The Institution of First Resort — For most of European history the mad were kept at home. Not because alternatives had not been invented, but because the household was the institution everybody turned to first — and reformers…
Madness Is of Many Kinds — The medieval Islamic world had a phrase for how many things madness could be, a founding story in which madness is cured by being told stories, and a hospital in Aleppo with flowers and music laid on…
Three Custodians in Thirty Years — Beijing had no asylum before 1908. Within thirteen years a poor family could hand a son to the police as a matter of routine; within thirty the police had handed the whole institution to…

Terms introduced

custody, therapeutic eclecticism, the institution of first resort, moral treatment, maristan, possession, distraction, committal

Part of the Simposeum course library.