The domestication of madness.

WE use the term "domestic" and its cognates in at least two very different contexts. On the one hand, there is the contrast between the wild and the tame: the sense in which we refer to animals as "domesticated". And on the other hand, there is the reference to the private familial sphere, the environment of the home and one's intimate circle: domestic as contrasted with public life. In this paper I shall suggest that the changing social responses to madness from the end of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries may be usefully looked at in terms of the metaphor of domestication., comprehending the transition from efforts to tame the wildly asocial to attempts to transform the company of the deranged into at least a facsimile of bourgeois family life. During the early eighteenth century, most English medical writing on mental disorder was concerned, not with the Bedlam mad,' but with the various manifestations of that Protean disorder, the grand "English malady",2 to which ladies and gentlemen of quality (but especially ladies of quality) displayed such a striking susceptibility. To be sure, there were some discussions of the seriously mad furious or moping to which I shall return shortly; but the main focus of concern was clearly the various "nervous" distempers the spleen, hypochondria, the vapours, hysteria to which the physicians' fashionable clientele, blessed with excessively refined sensibilities and exquisitely civilized temperaments (not to mention money), were apt to fall victim. Such speculations (and I use the word advisedly) as Thomas Willis and his epigoni ventured on the subject of lunacy itself reflected an intellectual fascination with the difficult problem of providing a rational explanation of the origins and characteristics of madness, coupled with a marked distaste for any close or continuing contact with those suffering from the disorder: a combination not unknown among later generations of academic psychiatrists, and one which led John Monro to remark with some asperity that "the person who is most conversant with such cases, provided he has but common sense enough to avoid metaphysical subtleties, will be enabled by