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 he saw in the course of his private practice--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.

The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing not to say inventing the diagnosis and treatment of madness.

About the Author

Jonathan Andrews is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University. His publications include The History of Bethlem (1997) and "They're in the Trade of Lunacy" (1998). Andrew Scull, author of Social Order/ Mental Disorder (California, 1989; 1992) and The Most Solitary of Afflictions (1993), among other books, is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. They are coauthors of Undertaker of the Mind (California, 2001), a wide-ranging study of the place of madness in eighteenth-century culture and society, seen through the prism of John Monro's life and career.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part 1. Managing Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London
1. Customers, Patrons, and Their Mad-Doctor
2. A Rare Resource: John Monro’s Case Book
3. Profiling Patients and Patterns of Practice
4. The Craft of Consultation: Managing Patients and Their Problems
5. Diagnosing the Mad
6. Religion, Madness, and the Case Book
7. Treating Patients and Getting Paid
8. Being Mad in Eighteenth-Century England: Patients’ Views of Their Own Illnesses

Part 2. John Monro’s 1766 Case Book

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Offers a rare opportunity to look over the shoulder of a professional ancestor as he goes about his practice. ... Its authors are uniquely qualified to add substantially to the reader’s experience, and they do so with great style and reassuring scholarship.”
— New England Journal Of Medicine

“The book has relevance for anyone interested in the later and until now rather better researched nineteenth-century alienists and the Victorian asylum, and also in the origins of twentieth-century office psychiatric practice.”
— Medical History

“This is an intriguing book which should be of interest to both the specialist and the general reader.”
— Metapsychology Online Review

"Messrs. Andrews and Scull report this fascinating story with a vivid feeling for the period's social history, art and literature."
— Wall Street Journal

"The authors/editors have performed an invaluable service not only to the scholarly community, but to anyone who cares about the treatment of those we call mentally ill. Their transcription and editing of the candid case book of a prominent mid-eighteenth-century physician provide an extraordinarily circumstantial and illuminating glimpse into a vanished world of private psychiatric practice, at once alien yet surprisingly familiar."—Charles E. Rosenberg, author of The Care of Strangers

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews