Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England

Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England

Scull, Andrew
Andrews, Jonathan

Hardcover

Series: Medicine and Society, Book 11

Biographies GeneralGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 0520231511
ISBN13: 9780520231511
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Nov 27 2001
Pages: 386
Weight: 1.67
Height: 1.24 Width: 6.41 Depth: 9.33
Language: English
As visiting physician to Bethlem Hospital, the archetypal Bedlam and Britain's first and (for hundreds of years) only public institution for the insane, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791) was a celebrity in his own day. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull call him a connoisseur of insanity, this high priest of the trade in lunacy. Although the basics of his life and career are well known, this study is the first to explore in depth Monro's colorful and contentious milieu. Mad-doctoring grew into a recognized, if not entirely respectable, profession during the eighteenth century, and besides being affiliated with public hospitals, Monro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous.

Monro's close social connections with members of the aristocracy and gentry, as well as with medical professionals, politicians, and divines, guaranteed him a significant place in the social, political, cultural, and intellectual worlds of his time. Andrews and Scull draw on an astonishing array of visual materials and verbal sources that include the diaries, family papers, and correspondence of some of England's wealthiest and best-connected citizens. The book is also distinctive in the coverage it affords to individual case histories of Monro's patients, including such prominent contemporary figures as the Earls Ferrers and Orford, the religious enthusiast Alexander Cruden, and the mad King George III, as well as his crazy would-be assassin, Margaret Nicholson.

What the authors make clear is that Monro, a serious physician neither reactionary nor enlightened in his methods, was the outright epitome of the mad-trade as it existed then, esteemed in some quarters and ridiculed in others. The fifty illustrations, expertly annotated and integrated with the text, will be a revelation to many readers.

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