Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade

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.

ISBN 0520226607   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9780520226609 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 685 Publisher The University Press Group Ltd   Published in CA Imprint University of California Press   Series ISSN 12 Format Hardback   Series title Medicine and Society S. Publication date 16 Jan 2003   Height (mm) 235 Library of Congress 2002067881   Width (mm) 159 DEWEY 362.210942109033   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Professional / Scholarly Pages 352

		List of Illustrations
		Preface
		Acknowledgments
Pt. I		Managing Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London		1
1		Customers, Patrons, and Their Mad-Doctor		5
2		A Rare Resource: John Monro's Case Book		13
3		Profiling Patients and Patterns of Practice		28
4		The Craft of Consultation: Managing Patients and Their Problems		45
5		Diagnosing the Mad		58
6		Religion, Madness, and the Case Book		82
7		Treating Patients and Getting Paid		92
8		Being Mad in Eighteenth-Century England: Patients' Views of Their Own Illnesses		107
Pt. II		John Munro's 1766 Case Book		117
		Notes		119
		Bibliography		177
		Index		203

"The authors/editors have performed an invaluable service not only to the scholarly community, but to anyone who cares about the treatment of those we call mentally ill."-Charles E. Rosenberg, author of The Care of Strangers

 Be the first to write a customer review