Full Description
This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.
Contents
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Part 1. Managing Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London 1. Customers, Patrons, and Their Mad-Doctor 2. A Rare Resource: John Monro's Case Book 3. Profiling Patients and Patterns of Practice 4. The Craft of Consultation: Managing Patients and Their Problems 5. Diagnosing the Mad 6. Religion, Madness, and the Case Book 7. Treating Patients and Getting Paid 8. Being Mad in Eighteenth-Century England: Patients' Views of Their Own Illnesses Part 2. John Monro's 1766 Case Book Notes Bibliography Index
