Troubled by Faith

Over the past twenty-five years, Davies has showed in a large outpouring of impressive books that magic, otherworldly experiences, demonic possession, visions, and other unexplained phenomena previously identified as superstitious have continued from the eighteenth century in the lives of many who live in “modern” Britain, Europe, and America. These instances are not mere “survivals,” nor do they represent the “re-enchantment” of the West. They have been there all along.The first half of this book examines the writings and attitudes of the medical establishment and of asylum administrators, mainly British but also French and American, who came to dominate nineteenth-century discourse about “insanity” to a degree that we rarely recognize today. Many of these men were eager to explain away the history of witchcraft and modern examples of demons and the supernatural as symptoms of disordered medical conditions. From this point of view, the historical witches were not guilty of any crime but were mad (or “mentally ill”). Similarly, the demonically possessed could be retrospectively diagnosed hysterical and mad. One problem with this sort of medical reductionism was that late nineteenth-century British and American cultures were awash in evangelical revivals and spiritualism, so that efforts to get rid of “superstitious” notions left the door open to other beliefs that were just as unproven. It turned out to be difficult to get rid of demons, ghosts, visions, and miraculous interventions when the public culture was overwhelmingly biblical and Christian. Davies documents all of these claims with a blizzard of citations from medical research, psychiatric texts, and public commentary—so much evidence, in fact, that the reader sometimes wonders where all of this information is leading.The second half of the book is devoted to anecdotes from British asylums, case reports and legal cases that prove to be a wonderfully rich source for understanding the religious views and demented imaginations from the bottom up. Many ordinary patients lived in a world that was abuzz with demons, witches, fairies, ghosts, visions, magic, saints, prophets, and the Devil himself. No wonder some of them felt haunted, possessed, or beset with their own visions, hostile charms, and portentous dreams. The introduction of new elements of technology, such as the telephone, phonograph records, and moving pictures did not dispel the belief in telepathic communication but rather provided more modern ways to channel the fears of the mad. In this half of the book, however, Davies again provides so much anecdotal detail and so little generalizing narrative that this reader at least was left to bounce almost directionless from example to example.In the end, the narrative staggers under a burden of too much evidence. But surely Davies is right that the “age of the asylum” from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth century cannot be called disenchanted. In the words of the British asylum doctors and asylum patients alike we find ample proof that supposedly irrational beliefs “were not irreconcilable with modernity at all” (3). This book provides a most valuable warning against overly simple notions of the rise of secular rationality in Western societies. Whether from the top down or from the bottom up, this social history of madness gives us a dense new portrait of complexity instead of any linear notion of progress

Criminology · Faith · Insanity · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Theology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy · Psychology