Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade

"Long subject to controversy, the rise of British psychiatry is now fleshed out through this series of well-researched and elegantly written lives of the pioneering mad doctors.'"—Ray Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of MedicineThrough an examination of the fascinating lives and careers of a series of nineteenth-century "mad-doctors, " Masters of Bedlam provides a unique perspective on the creation of the modern profession of psychiatry, taking us from the secret and shady practices of the trade in lunacy, through the utopian expectations that were aroused by the lunacy reform movement, to the dismal realities of the barracks- asylums—those Victorian museums of madness within which most nineteenth-century alienists found themselves compelled to practice. Across a century that spans the period from an unreformed Bedlam to the construction of a post-Darwinian bio-psychiatry centered on the new Maudsley Hospital, from a therapeutics of bleeding, purging, and close confinement through the era of moral treatment and nonrestraint to a fin-de-si