Undertaker of the Mind

"As visiting physician to Bethlem Hospital, the archetypal "Bedlam" and Britain's first (and for hundreds of years only) public institution for the insane, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791) was a celebrity in his own day. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull call him a "connoisseur of insanity, this high priest of the trade in lunacy." Although the basics of his life and career are well known, this study is the first to explore in depth Monro's colorful and contentious milieu. Mad-doctoring grew into a recognized, if not entirely respectable, profession during the eighteenth century, and so many generations of Monros were affiliated with Bethlem that they practically seemed to serve by divine right. Their rule there may have been far from absolute, since attending physicians were in reality employees of the governors who controlled public hospitals, but in the same period John Munro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous.". "What the authors make clear is that Monro, a serious physician neither reactionary nor enlightened in his methods, was the outright epitome of the mad-trade as it existed then, esteemed in some quarters and ridiculed in others. Andrews and Scull draw on an astonishing array of visual materials and verbal sources that include the diaries, family papers, and correspondence of some of England's wealthiest and best-connected citizens. The book is also distinctive in the coverage it affords to the individual case histories of Monro's patients, including such prominent contemporary figures as the Earls Ferrers and Orford, the religious "enthusiast" Alexander Cruden, and the "mad" King George III, as well as his crazy would-be assassin, Margaret Nicholson. The fifty illustrations, expertly annotated and integrated with the text, will be a revelation to many readers. Not only historians but anyone interested in ideas of mental illness and practices of mad-doctoring through the years will find Undertaker of the Mind absorbing reading."--BOOK JACKET.