Madness: A Brief History

Madness: A Brief History

This fascinating story of madness reveals the radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day.<br /><br />Roy Porter explores what we really mean by 'madness', covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac.<br /><br />The origins of current debates about how we define and deal with insanity are examined through eyewitness accounts of those treating patients, writers, artists, and the mad themselves.