The eighteenth-century origins of angina pectoris: predisposing causes, recognition and aftermath

Revels in madness will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars, especially for those looking for more obscure figures, like the German Romantic psychiatrists J C Reil, J C A Heinroth, and K W Ideler, whom Thiher describes in detail since few medical libraries have their books. In his introduction, Thiher indicates his distance from Foucault's "brilliant, influential ... but misguided" Histoire de la folie. Although he sees both literature and medicine as discourses, or "language games", Thiher disagrees with Foucault's theories of historical discontinuities and ruptures. Instead, he emphasizes the continuities in the ways of speaking about madness, including the continuities between literary and medical perspectives. "Madness and literature", he contends, "spring from the same imaginative capacity to entertain present worlds that do not (really) exist." The literary imagination "has historically shared certain features of the insane imagination"; and the content of madness is "often an imaginative form of fictional construct". Since the madman and the writer are both experts on these imaginative worlds, then "literature gives access to madness", and poets, novelists, and literary critics ought to be able to help doctors and psychiatrists understand mental phenomena. But is the opposite true as well; would we look to the insane and their physicians for literary expertise and critical insight? Thiher does not ask this kind of question, and his study is more that of a literary scholar organizing psychiatric texts and theories in accordance with literary history, than a contribution to the more interdisciplinary studies of the past two decades. He knows Pope, but not the work of Roy Porter; he discusses J-J Rousseau, but has not heard of George; in short, he has an exhaustive knowledge of European and American literature, and a familiarity with the basic texts of psychiatry; but he does not know the immense secondary literature on the cultural history of psychiatry that would make this study part of a conversation, rather than a learned monologue.