Petteri Pietikäinen, Madness. A History

In this readable and thought-provoking history of madness, Petteri Pietikäinen has synthesised scholarship produced mainly since the 1960s to construct a history of madness that sweeps across two millennia, primarily relating to northern Europe and the western world. Drawing together so many strands into such a coherent whole that is layered with his own nuanced interpretations is no mean feat. Readers are left in no doubt as to the complexity of such a troubling and troubled topic. However you look at it, madness is a slippery subject. For Pietikäinen, writing its history is almost tantamount to writing a history of what it has meant to be human within ever-changing constructs of normalcy and deviance. To this end he traces the conceptual evolution of madness from the mythologies and Biblical accounts of the ancient world through medieval belief systems and into the early modern and modern periods. The book concentrates mainly on this latter era when religious interpretations, such as diabolical possession, were gradually replaced by new scientific and medical theories. Yet Pietikäinen is keen to write more than a straight history of psychiatry. Pace Roy Porter, he has ensured that the voices of those who were really at the sharp end of psychiatric ideologies and practices, the patients themselves, are as audible as those of the priests and physicians

Art · Deviance (statistics · Ideology · Linguistics · Literature · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Possession (linguistics · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents · Computer Science · Research in Social Sciences · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy