Madness and Civilization Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault has achieved something truly creative in this book on the history of madness during the so-called classical age: the end of the sixteenth and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than to review historically the concept of madness, the author has chosen to recreate, mostly from original documents, mental illness, folly, and unreason as they must have existed in their time, place, and proper social perspective. In a sense, he has tried to re-create the negative part of the concept, that which has disappeared under the retroactive influence of presentday ideas and the passage of time.

Too many historical books about psychic disorders look at the past in the light of the present; they single out only what has positive and direct relevance to present-day psychiatry. This book belongs to the few which demonstrate how skillful, sensitive scholarship uses history to enrich, deepen, and reveal new avenues for thought and investigation.

At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable.

For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.

From the High Middle Ages to the end of the Crusades, leprosariums had multiplied their cities of the damned over - the entire face of Europe. According to Mathieu Paris, there were as many as 19,000 of them throughout Christendom. In any case, around 1226, when Louis VIII established the lazar-house law for France, more than 2,000 appeared on the official registers.

Michel Foucault studied at the Sorbonne, earning his Licence de Philosophie in 1948, his Licence de Psychologie in 1950, and the Diplome de Psycho-Pathologie from the Université de Paris in 1952. He was a lecturer at the University of Upsala, Sweden, for four years, and in 1959-60 he was the Director of the Institut Francais in Hamburg, Germany. He then became a Professor and the Director of the Institut de Philosophie at the Faculté des Lettres in Clermont, France.

Dr. Foucault has lectured in many universities, including those in Copenhagen, Oslo, Lisbon, Madrid, Istanbul, Naples, and Brussels. He writes frequently for French newspapers and reviews and is an editor of Critique.

His three other books, published in France in 1962-63, deal with psychology and medical history. Madness and Civilization, his first book, was published in France in 1961 and won the Medal of the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. It is his first work to appear in English.