Popular Images and Medical Concepts

Present-day images of the mad and their treatment in previous centuries are frequently stereotypical generalizations. On the one hand there is the gloomy picture of friendless lunatics, exposed to squalor, punishment and neglect. On the other there is the vision of the mad as endowed with supernatural capacities. Both images may contain a grain of truth. Augustan society for example tended to envisage, and frequently treated, the mad as bestial and subhuman, and the abominable conditions under which a James Norris was incarcerated for years in Bethlem Hospital were not examples of the humanitarianism said to have characterized the Georgian age. Similarly, although the fabulous ‘ship of fools’ may owe its existence to poetic licence, the ‘idiot colony’ at Gheel was certainly no chimera.

Neither the gloomy nor the sublime image accurately reflects the heterogeneity of social responses towards the ‘abnormal’. Furthermore, these stereotypical representations tend to project the false idea of simple uni-linear development. The history of the mad is construed as a development either from ‘better’ to ‘worse’, ‘noble’ to ‘abominable’ on the one hand, or from ‘scandalous’ to ‘enlightened’, ‘dark’ to ‘light’ on the other. The Victorian reformers’ picture of Georgian attitudes, for example, reflects the conviction that the eighteenth century's dungeons had been replaced by clean and airy establishments and that the insane had been liberated from abuse, cruelty and neglect.