The title of Foucault's book from the French 'Folie et Déraison. Historie de la folie à l’age classique' gives away immediately two themes: Reason and madness. The obviousness of making this statement requires an explanation as Foucault was not just explicitly describing these phenomenon in isolation. These themes express the profound changes of what can reasonably be inferred, from Foucault's thesis, as the process of modernity. Modernity as the propulsive force that changed the multitude of discursive practices and the discourses about madness through the epochs that Foucault describes, and what is both obvious and impossible to ignore, the culmination of the impact of the events which would eventually lead to the aspirations and the age of enlightenment philosophy. Reason and madness can be seen as prime indicators of the change in the way of thinking of Western society during the period.
But rather than focus directly on the theoretical foundations of revolutionary enlightenment thinking, Foucault attempted to give an account of the more subtle means of the social transmission of one of the most fundamental of enlightenment ideals upon a platform he refered to as “social sensibilities”. Social sensiblities can be seen to be a constellation of non-professional knowledge, behaviours and attitudes toward one another that assist in moral coherence within a community. These sensiblities lent support to popular notions concerning 'forms of madness', which conformed to the morally-encoded social and economic changes of the periods that he discussed. Overall, what is most clear is that Foucault attempted to compress these gradual changes into only a very few key events in a similar way that the sacking of Rome is used as a key historical marker to express the fall of the classical Roman Empire, the rise of the Byzantine Empire in the east and the beginning of the 'dark ages'. What he elucidated from the result of this compression are the two main events, propelled by modernity that run concurrently throughout Foucault’s history: hence the focus of his thesis on two core themes, that of Reason and madness. But precisely how do these two terms germinate and subsequently resonate to those developing societies of each age?
Foucault’s History of Madness (from now on abbreviated to HM) begins with the emergence of a particular concept of madness from the medieval period (High Middle Ages). Since Christianity, madness had still been regarded as an extrinsic part of man while paradoxically being configured as an inseparable and unprejudiced element of human experience, synonymous with the passion, religious ecstasy, and ultimately with the Divine. And yet madness was a product of the search for something, somewhere ‘out there’ not existing in man per se but of a divine providence and as an objective of spiritual enquiry. Madness was more of a blessing. Bestowed upon a person as a result of a profound search – a key feature which manifests itself in the age-old tradition of the fool. The fool was regarded as a paragon of one who was searching for his sanity and to redeem his or her spiritual self as extolled in the classic text of the period that Foucault refers, Sebastian Brant's, Das Narrenschiff (1494)(1). In this satire the fools depart in ships to search for the promised land of Narragonia.
What this entails is not so much a conceptualization of madness than a re-orientation of its objective position, the fools were not perceived as abnormal or insane but rather as part of the evolution of the human subject. The journey of the madman was an alteration of a normative state. Its social and cultural value was seen as positive and even beneficial. However, the source of this state was external and not what would become later on a subject of objective scientific scrutiny or a product of a particular form of ‘special’ knowledge. Thus, far beyond this paradigm during the advent of scientific positivism this all changed. The Ship of Fools was seen once and for all to sail over the horizon never to return, an indication of a loss of a certain kind of positive tradition and a harbinger of the social and cultural changes that would ensue. Subsequently, changes in the structure of knowledge would cause a departure from this medieval concept of madness, and it is from this point we encounter the first phase of Foucault’s history of madness in the chapter, Stulifera Navis (Ship of Fools).
In this chapter, as well as discussing Brant's Das Narrenschiff, also references a body of similar works that embodied similar themes that continue the tradition of the Stulifera Navis: Foucault indicates a profound change and did not mean that these kind of stories became extinct. Above all he is making a point of describing the advent of the Early Modern Period, and what amounts as a crisis of modern thought. Within this crisis an appeal is made to the moral being of man: the concepts that evoked the extrinsic spiritual object of madness gradually shifting.
Whilst the Middle Ages had become dominated by an array of very grim literary and artistic apocalyptic visions dominated by the very real theme of death, plague and leprosy, it appeared as though man had been abandoned by God and out of this abandonment a new mythology began to emerge. A space created for a new kind discourse, which would take up the empty residences of the vacant Lazar houses and Leprosariums, these vestiges that once housed God's blessed cursed.
So Foucault accords these physical spaces vacant and viable for the potential formation of a new scourge and punishment by God. But what scourge? He suggests that this space needed to be filled. The new scourge was not birthed from a physical or organic state or even a developing discourse - the axis from which Foucault’s work operates - because ‘madness’ did not exist in this sense. Madness only existed out of a provision arising slowly from the relationship of Christian-held notions that formed a dialogue between reason and unreason. This emerging condition, that was not yet madness as we see it today, was to be seen as something to fear in place of death, a sublimation of madness above death as a ‘senseless unreason’, emerging insidiously from the same: “dark kingdom…which linked madness to the powerful tragic forces that controlled the world” (HM: 22). If one could not control death then one would control something far more dreadful than it, for what could be more terrifying than death other than a life lived as a madman who had lost all sense of reason and hope and quite possibly lose his soul.
Thus ‘madness’ was slowly shifting from a once fairly normative and non-threatening aspect of human experience, through the apocalyptic landscape of the plague, disease and war-ridden Middle Ages into a new world wrought of a new epidemic, a curse of ‘senseless unreason’ far worse than death. In fact, death had now become the parody and life-affirming “Danse Macabre” exhibited in the works of artists such as Hans Holbein's “The Dance of Death”, and others such as Michael Wolgemut's work of the same name during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Fictional and philosophical works subsequently attempted to understand and command this new form of ‘senseless unreason’. Various works captured these newly evolving medieval perceptions of madness. For instance, although Erasmus had satirized madness in the classic In Praise of Folly” in 1511, he had at the very same time traced it:
“[the] many forms of madness abound each day sees so many new ones born” (HM: 26)
And so, out of this ménage arose a dual aspect of madness. One appeared as darker maleficent and esoteric form:
Where mad faces slowly slip away into the night of world, in landscapes that speak of strange alchemies and knowledge (HM: 26)
The other more benign forms existed in satirical and moralistic fictional narratives of madness as Follie encapsulated in Brant’s cargoes of madmen sent in ships away from towns and cities, down rivers, in search of their reason. The moral tale took this wisdom of folly to be “at work, at the heart of reason.” (HM: 13) Moreover, it was an event which began to materialize and asserted as actual practice, selective, yet disorganized and the first instance in Foucault's account of the expulsion of madmen as a part of their ritual social exclusion (HM: 10).
The exclusion had various functions of which one was of the humanistic variety: The distance of the ship sailing down the river safely positioned and orientated madness in the collective mind of society so that unreason could be conquered, like death, even at the very least symbolically as expressed in the literary classics of Miguel de Cervantes “Don Quixote” and in William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”. In addition, although socially excluded, the madmen still had a chance at salvation and “spiritual reintegration” (HM: 10) by going off in search of their reason that existed somewhere ‘out there’ in God’s country or that other imaginary land of Narragonia.
At this time madness did not have any singular identity in its own right, there was no figure of madness. Predominantly because madness was deemed to inhabit a realm of “meaning beyond reason” (Merquior, 1991: 21), and because it was reason and its relationship to unreason that dominated the minds of Renaissance men. It was virtually an intangible essence of a metaphysical quality usually reserved for the Divine. But folly still belied a slight menace in its aspect of the fool:
Madmen were both threat and derision, the vertiginous unreason of the world, shallow and ridiculous men. (HM: 13)
While Renaissance man wrestled with this concept of reason and to polarize it so as to break “the tentative dialogue between reason and unreason” (Macey, 2007: 58), it was further engendered by the catastrophic calamities such as war, plague, disease and famine that had swept Europe. Madness began to unfold somewhere within the discourse between reason and unreason as an ‘unnatural’ state of being moulded with moral connotations and convictions. What entailed was a kind of imaginative attempt at a systematic subjectification of madness, rather than a systematization that would emerge as a response to the trend of logical positivism of nineteenth century science.
But already by the second period, or 'classical age', around the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, this subjectification was short – lived. Due in part in the failure to give madness a precise identity or diagnose it adequately so that “madness ceased to be” (Merquior, 1991: 21). What followed quite abruptly, under royal decree in 1657 was the institutionalization of the poor. The unclassifiable members of society without dignity rank or privilege; the criminal, paupers, social deviants, idlers, radicals, prostitutes, and mad were interred under the auspices of it central administrative authority, the Hôpital Général. A sovereign administration agency set up in Paris, which was to attend to social and economic concerns by attending to the needs and care of the poor, which became the dominant theme of l’Age Classique.
All over France the Lazar houses that Foucault mentions had long since fallen into disuse with the disappearance of leprosy from Europe and were now ‘bedlams’ and ‘houses of confinement’ for this homogeneous group. The imaginary ship that once carried wise fools on epic journeys of spiritual discovery during the Renaissance had now become the grim reality of the dismal hospital. The mad had ‘fallen from grace'.
So what guided the experience of madness during this time was no longer revelation, divine experience or parody but to define the mad provisionally by the powers vested of classical reason which it anointed itself in the experience of unreason - the possibility of confining these subjects by noting that they were not ill in the medical sense of the word or criminal but simply that they were:
‘Frenzied’…denoting an undifferentiated region of disorder – a disorder of the spirit, or a disordered way of life…that required moral policing (HM: 109)
The systematic process of confinement and the homogenizing of society's ‘deviants’ meant that the preliminary ‘figure of the madman simply faded away “so much so that the trace of the mad almost disappears” (HM: 118).
This clash of “age-old superstition”, the fear of unreason inherent in disorder was also threat to social and economic well-being, and to the“bourgeois medical sentimentality (HM: 115)”. In regards of frenzy, imbecility and the generation of a multitude of other ‘species’ madness linked the classical experience of madness with social perceptions through what was emerging as essentially a form of pseudo-medical science and not far removed from medical quackery(2). This entailed that by the mid-seventeenth century only doctors, not necessarily medical:
Were competent to decide if an individual was mad, and to determine the degree to which he still had the use of his reason. Lawyers could recognize madmen by his speech, if he is incapable of giving order to it, and he could also recognize him by his actions. (HM: 123) (3)
Such pseudo-medical judgements were being bolstered by canon law and taken to be self-evident truths of a dilapidation of a man's reason. Yet it still took a physician to turn these judgements into certainties:
[The] physician could carefully weigh up a subject’s life history…and all the judgements...deciding whether or not some form of illness was involved. (HM: 123)
Most importantly madness and its attributes of melancholy and certain other species of madness would become various forms of idleness. It also entered a new dialogue and relationship between socio-economic order and disorder (HM: 49), with symbolic links to the health of the State. To remedy this was to target the malignant form of social sickness, which was embodied in all of societies deviants and economic 'in-valids'.
Meanwhile, Reason became the ‘workhorse’ in the hands of this social order and the new-found social and economic sensibility. Madness, laziness and poverty became a social and economic problem of the city:
The social horizon of poverty, the inability to work or the impossibility of integrating into a social group (HM: 77)
And so the ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ were set to labour in the workhouse divisions of the Hopital. With no aim toward psychotherapeutic treatment:
its chief concern was to ‘sever and correct’. Political sensibilities and objectives began to change too, for the origin of poverty was neither food shortages nor unemployment, but the relaxation of discipline and corruption of morals (HM: 72)
The sovereignty of socio-economic import laid the once great fear of madness as unreason to rest, dissociated it from social concerns, and confined it within a moral intuition with social sanctions. The experience of unreason itself was finally contained by associating it with the moral subjection of the mad, and madness was compared to it as the antonym of nature itself in its totality (HM: 191). But the voice of madness resonant in the dialogue of Renaissance folly was now silent and settled, variegate amongst the denizens of the idle, behind the walls.
However, a new narrative and myth promulgated in these asylums as the receptacles, which began to acquire a legacy of immorality and corruption where “evil fermented within the closed spaces of confinement…of evil, violence…degradation and misfortune” (HM: 356), which over time caused increasing mounting social concern.
Unreason, hidden in these spaces of confinement re-emerged as a new disease, a new form of leprosy, and being of a distinct “social type” which could be contagiously transmitted by contact with the morally defunct, corrupted poor and criminal. As Foucault defined it, this “Great Fear” of moral panic and of confinement “formulated in medical terms” was animated by a whole “moral mythology” permeating the cities of France” (HM: 355, 356), which bequeathed a new phase of social hysteria not experienced since the epidemics of the Middle Ages. The unease by the mere transport of the mad through the streets of the towns and cities of France was thought to leave hysteria in its wake like a highly infectious contagion:
Came into being and spread in all directions was an evil, equally physical and moral, enveloping obscure powers of corruption and horror in that confusion. An undifferentiated image of rottenness reigned concerning the corruption of morals as much as the decomposition of flesh (HM: 356)
Now in a dramatic pre-Classical superstitious revival of unreason it was not a medieval God or disease that made men mad on account of the loss of their reason, but the hidden and malignant ‘senseless unreason’- a crisis now embodied not in society but in a relatively small minority on its margins. Classical man had sought to forget behind a mélange of abstract sensibilities and reassurances about society and order - the same unreason from which corruption threatened to flow and burst from the walls of confinement, as the Great Fear. It was this gestating age-old evil of unreason festering within the prison walls that became the new source of madness and so it was prisons that would harbour them (see HM: 400).
Meanwhile, medical treatment had been rudimentary. During the Great Confinement madness escaped all medical control and hospitals were nothing more than places of correction (HM: 120). Madness that had been reigned in by morals and sensibilities was no longer to be feared, but fear was to be invoked upon the mad rather than medication to “reduce the insane to orderly conduct”. (HM: 121). Subsequently:
physicians were struck by the inhumanity of the treatment the mad received, and everywhere they noted the same misery and inability to alleviate it.(HM: 114)
The mad were not treated medically because they did not fall ill or were “considered ill because of their madness” and at places such as Bicêtre they were considered incurable (HM: 111, 112).
In all, the corruption of morals that was imagined to permeate the walls of any one single asylum, like a sickness, fell under the auspices of a single physician whose task it was to treat it and prevent the spread of its contagion (see HM: 112).
This moral conundrum gave fuel to madness' acquisition of its elevated status as a specialist kind of medical knowledge. But medicine was still operating according to the archaic principles of the Hippocratic humoral theory. Sickness of the body and mind was directly related to the sickness of the soul and it was still thought to be maintained by the presence of vapours and the stabilization of ‘humours’. In humoral theory the body is filled with four basic substances which are in balance in the healthy person and that all illnesses, diseases or disabilities were caused by a deficit or imbalance of the these substances.
As already mentioned, an increasing number of pseudo-medical practices began to arise in tandem with the development of panaceas or 'cure-alls', a phenomenon that has been referred to by Roy Porter (1989) as a form of medical ‘quackery’. Quack medicine was now given the authority with its conceptual roots deep in the this Hippocratic and later Galenic traditions so that madness was seen to arise from a ‘corruption of the humors’ (HM: 302; Lindemann, 1999: 9), which was a form of bodily deterioration, arising from immoral and sexual improprieties (see HM: 304) leading to a state of ‘passion’ or ‘delirium’. From the time of the Great Confinement “madness had nothing more than a moral relationship to forbidden sexual acts” (HM: 546). The ‘health’ of the soul was at stake and “Irregular movements of the spirits” were thought to cause illness including madness (see HM: 307) and was compared to a ‘natural state’ of being or absolute nature: meaning a state of being in its entirety or the complete natural state.
Such theories of curative processes guided by a revived concept of Nature were contrived from a tradition based on sympathetic medicine, and the myth of the panacea or ‘cure-all’ and other pseudo-medicine that was informed by the application of “operative metaphors” (HM: 309). For instance"use of water, purity and the balance of solids and liquids takes place…water… the fluid element that the universal exchange of qualities could take place”. Thus conditions that produced excessive ‘dryness’ were to be combated by the application of tinctures or ‘medicines’ that produced ‘wetness’, similarly maladies that produced a condition of excessive ‘heat’ were to be countered by the application of remedies that produced ‘coldness’. It was these excesses that contributed toward the conditions of melancholia, delirium, mania, hysteria or other nervous ‘illnesses’ (HM: 315).
In the pharmacopoeia and medical treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, therefore, one would find advice on the use of “emeralds” said the physician Lemery in his Dictionnaire des Drogues, “are excellent for sweetening the bitter humours (the physiological location where such conditions of heat and coldness arise), if delicately ground and swallowed”. Elsewhere, "fresh urine excellent for hysterical vapours”, and the physician Buchoz recommended “mothers milk…for any nervous illness, and urine for all forms of hypochondriac sickness (HM: 302, 303)
The organic origin of mental illness in this context given here as the ‘nervous illness proper’, meant that treatment was being directed toward the body rather than the mind. Consequently an aspect of madness was lost. It became a formally recognized disease so “it lost it’s dignity of being seen as meaningful unreason” (Merquior, 1991: 24).
This constituted the first preferred method of treatment through medication. However, medical thought and practice diverged at this point as the application of physical methods that “tended to lacerate the surface of the body, creating wounds”, attempted to correct madness whereby, “the brain was disturbed by black vapours, caused by blood which clogged the finer vessels through which the animal spirits ought freely to pass (HM: 331).” In retaliation, bleeding, purging, cold baths and showers, burning and cauterising the body, opening creating and leaving open wounds in the head. Even the encouragement of skin conditions such as scabies and small pox were thought to alleviate this clogging, ending the attack of madness by liberating this ‘corruption’ of the brain (HM: 331). The prime result intended was the “dissolution and externalization of the malady” (HM: 312). Medical practice was externalizing unreason, locked up within the mysterious confines of the madman, and now madness was made visible and commanded again in the medical light of Reason. This was the medical truth, as the Classical Age knew it then. Madness was finally made tangible.
These treatments, particularly the use of water, brought together what Foucault saw as two coherent ideas, the rituals of purity and rebirth and the:
Psychological idea of impregnation that modifies the essential qualities of liquids and solids…the idea of Nature and all its ambiguities served as a cohesive element (HM: 313, 314)
The search for totalities, for total truth and total nature – with the intention of unifying the two into an abstract whole that explained all things, all maladies, all illnesses, and would provide the answers to the order of the universe, mirroring itself in the microcosm inherent in the order of society. So much so that all phenomenon, even madness would lose its privilege of being, at the very least, meaningful unreason: now compartmentalized and organized and operating within the faculty of Reason. Madness became an isolate “not because of medical science” so much as a “consciousness susceptible to scandal” (HM: 125). Thus despite all this development of the ideologue madness remained a social privilege. To be diagnosed, not medically, but as valued judgements based on social and moral perceptions of behaviour (e.g. HM: 128)
A combination of the menace gestating behind the walls of the asylums, and the realignment of the relationship between reason and madness as a modulate of Nature and universal order was not enough that physical remedy alone would not cure these ills. Investigation was immanent under a new kind of authority.
The move to reorganize “through the process of purification” (HM: 359) brought on the reform of the asylums around the time of the French Revolution in 1789. Not for what was humanitarian but “the desire to reduce contamination by the destruction of vapours and impurities ‘fermenting’” [there] (HM: 359). In terms of instigating a novel re-ordering of the social mind - a kind of social cosmology that sought to integrate society, nature, science and the way it was all governed – would deal with the Ancien Regime, which was at the same time as madness, something to be cured of its immoral ills and mores which had led to the socio-economic crisis and conflicts culminating in the Revolution. In anticipation, 1785 saw the inception of a decree of the ‘Great Circular’ instigated by the Grand Assembly to remove the often violent and abusive forms of physical treatment iconoclastically exemplified in a singular event: the ‘liberation of the mad’, which marked what Foucault specifically refers to as the “Birth of the Asylum”. This does not refer to the birth of the asylum per se, but more to the introduction of the asylum system or more correctly as a new ‘ideal treatment’ of the mad.
The treatment was ‘successfully’ carried out under the authority of Philippe Pinel in Paris and the Tukes in York, and what was also an indirect reaction to the incoherence of medical thought and practice: the grand humane reassessment and reconciliation of a relationship between physical medicine and moral treatment.
Each individual contained within the walls were to be assessed on an individual basis (HM: 171) not as a mass homogeneous whole. This achieved the final successful separation of the mad from the poor and the criminal (HM: 463). So from the eighteenth century the madman emerged from the “secret interrogation” and “social disgrace” of the great confinement (HM: 353), he was unchained. But now the madmen entered into another form of ‘moral interrogation’ and again back into the grace of God. But this time, the grace of God was given, through the Tukes, Quakers and the other ‘innumerable Societies of Friends’ (HM: 465) as part of a more intricate subtext of the ‘ordering’ process. Reaching its pre-eminence in the eighteenth century, guided by the implementation of ideals about the importance of the “relationship of family and children structured around the theme of paternal authority” (HM: 507), the mad became prisoners of a different kind. Now their condition reflected “a gigantic moral imprisonment, a microcosm of the bourgeois society and its values” (HM: 507).
In single movement, the asylum, in the hands of Pinel, becomes an instrument of moral uniformity and social denunciation. The intention was to erect one form of morality as universal, which was to be imposed from within on other forms of morality that were foreign to it, and which contained the alienation that would inevitably affect people in the end. In the first case, the asylum was to act as an awakening and reminder, invoking the forgotten nature, in the second it was to act as a social displacement, to uproot individuals from their condition (HM: 495)
What it entailed was a certain sense of freedom. But these punitive measures were no more than a “reorganization process”(HM: 470) of the same processes. A requirement to improve the existing essential functions of confinement – readdressed as the ‘asylum’ where new visitors’ could gaze upon the mad to teach society “the wages of immorality” (HM: 359) mirroring the bourgeois authoritarian order (Horrocks, 2004). The insane appear in an objectivity that is no longer veiled by persecution or the frenzy” (HM: 471). The madman as spectacle.
Past the grand iconoclasms of liberation and religious 'do-gooding', the reality of the situation?
“[the] law of 1790 that had planned the creation of large hospitals for the insane by 1793 none had yet materialized...Bicêtre…still contained a confused mixture of the poor, the old, criminal and mad…including political prisoners”. (HM: 467)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century medicine was heavily influenced by pseudo-scientific notions, accompanied by the themes of ‘awakening’, ‘theatrical realization’ - the realization of the non-being of madness (HM: 329), and the binary opposite of this in the return to the immediate (suppression of mad theatrics) (HM: 334). Pinel believed that ‘awakening’ of reason had no meaning in the cure (HM: 329), yet oddly referred to the theme of a ‘return to the immediate’. By this, Pinel took part in the “re-investment of idyllic values of a rediscovered unity between unreason and nature” (HM: 337). A return to nature or more in keeping with the theme of re-ordering, the “command of nature” (HM: 337). With man as its ‘keeper’ – a worker of nature would not, rather than a pedagogic instrument, seek to unearth Natures wisdom or deeper mysteries. A worker would use his “natural instinct (the same ‘inherent’ moral nature of jurisprudence that instructs law) to “push men to fecundate the earth and tend the needs of the fruits of nature with their industry(...)Nature is mediated by morality”(HM: 337, 338): a type of scientific romanticism at best.
Nature as Reason could only ever be obscured, while nature as Truth of the world always remains adequate to itself, and it was from the last Nature as Reason could be woken and restored; and the exercise of reason, when it coincided with truth, permitted the restoration of Nature as Health (HM: 473)
With a new injection of religious doctrine akin to a the likes of a protestant work ethic, abstract albeit pseudo-medical, discourse was once again using madness to inform ideals about knowledge and its extricable ties to its grounds in nature – in fact a:
“whole milieu of abstract relations where man risked losing the physical happiness in which the world normally takes place” (HM: 370).
Ideas, knowledge beliefs: an entire culture set of values about madness were placed inside this circle where a further instigation of normative social conditioning was taking place, so much so that by the late eighteenth century:
Excessive study, lack of labour (…) no exercise (…) overt religious beliefs (…) even the novel [were a] perversion of this sensibility (HM: 369 - 371)
From this dialectic the positivism of the nineteenth century was able to take root (HM: 475). In a paradoxical turn-around of events, Pinel's romantic re-investment in the unity of unreason and nature. The“legends of Tuke and Pinel transmit mythical values, which psychiatry…came to accept as natural truths”. (HM: 481) instigated its exact opposite: the domination of scientific positivist thought of the nineteenth century. Unreason and the intangible forces of nature, the divine and finally madness would fall under scientific scrutiny forever, dissolving into the ‘absolute truth of nature’ never to be seen again, so that by the time of scientific positivism, unreason was completely eradicated. The annals of informative discourses on the science and treatment of the insane arose from:
“beneath the myths…a whole series of operations that silently organized the world of the asylum, the methods of cure, and the concrete experiences of madness” (HM: 481)
footnotes:
1 Type of literary composition in the style of the Argonaut or Wagner’s Ring Cycle
2 For a comprehensive review of medical quackery, see Roy Porter (1989), Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1600 –1850 (Manchester Uni. Press)
3 Doctors were often simultaneously lawyers during this time such was the case with the French physician, lawyer and naturalist Pierre Joseph Buchoz (1731-1807)
Bibliography
Foucault, M. (1961), History of Madess: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason (trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa) (Routledge, London)
Horrocks, C and Jevtic, Z. (2004), Introducing Foucault (Icon, Royston)
Lindemann, M. (1999), Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press) p. 9
Macey, D. (2007), "Fully Foucault", Radical Philosophy 141: 57-59
Merquior, J.G. (1991), Foucault (Fantana, London) pp. 21-34
