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 drawn from a great variety of social strata - offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. Monro was the physician to Bethlem Hospital and the second in a dynasty of Dr. Monros who monopolized that office for over a century. His hospital, the oldest and most famous/infamous psychiatric establishment in the English-speaking world, was the mystical, mythical Bedlam of our collective imaginings. But Monro also had an extensive private practice ministering to the mad and was the proprietor of several private metropolitan madhouses. His case book testifies to the scope and prosperity of Monro's "trade in lunacy," and Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull brilliantly exploit the opportunity it affords to look inside the mad-business." "The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. Apparently the only such document to survive from eighteenth-century England, the case book covers no more than a year of Monro's practice, yet it provides rare and often intimate details on a hundred of his private patients. As Andrews and Scull show, Monro's notes, when read with care and interpreted within a broader historical context, document an unparalelled perspective on the relatively fluid, reciprocal, and negotiable relations that existed between the mad-doctor and his patients, their families, and other practitioners. The fragmented stories reveal a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, and Andrews and Scull place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and other successful doctors were practicing (and inventing) the diagnosis and treatment of madness."--BOOK JACKET.