Madness and Civilization Michel Foucault

Overview

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 – from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

michel foucault madness and civilization book cover
Publisher Vintage Books
ISBN 039471914X
Year 1973
Pages299
Format PDF

Summary

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. Madness and Civilization belongs to the few which demonstrate how skillful, sensitive scholarship uses history to enrich, deepen, and reveal new avenues for thought and investigation.

Contents
  1. "Stultifera Navis"
  2. The Great Confinement
  3. The Insane
  4. Passion and Delirium
  5. Aspects of Madness
  6. Doctors and Patients
  7. The Great Fear
  8. The New Division
  9. The Birth of the Asylum
  10. Conclusion

Extract

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.

Autor

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.

Book Details

Title Madness and Civilization
Subtitle A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Autor Michel Foucault
Publisher Vintage Books
Year 1973
Pages299
CountryUnited States of America
ISBN 039471914X
Translation Richard Howard
Format PDF
Filesize 13.8 MB
URL Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization PDF
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