Madmen

Community breakdown

Bars show the community-aggregated score per category. Rate this book to contribute.

"What was it like to be insane in the Georgian England of Mary Wollstonecraft and Coleridge (himself afficted with madness)? How were our eighteenth-century ancestors confined and how were they treated by the fledgling psychiatric 'profession'? Indeed, how was the most famous mad person of the century - Shelley's 'old, mad, blind, despised king' George III - treated before his final descent into senility in 1808?" "Best-selling popular historian Roy Porter looks at the bizarre and savage practices of mad-doctors treating those afflicted by 'manias', ranging from huge doses of opium, blood-letting and cold-water immersion to beatings, confinement in cages and blistering. The author reveals how Bethlem - the London asylum created to care for the capital's mentally sick - was riddled with sadism and embezzlement, and if that wasn't dehumanising enough, jeering, ogling sightseers were permitted entry - for a fee of course."--BOOK JACKET.