Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London, With the Complete Text of John Monro's 1766 Case Book

by Jonathan Andrews, Andrew Scull

This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London.

The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.

Genres: History

450 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 2002

Reviews

[Frank Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents and discusses the case book of the doctor John Monro from the year 1766. It is a great window into his mind and those of the people he saw during that year. He made initial entries for each patient, and short notations about the outcomes for some of them. A picture of the actual case book is here http://wendywallace.co.uk/2011/10/bef... The same authors' book Undertaker of the Mind is a good companion book. If you do therapy with people, you shouldn't miss this information about how it was done over 200 years ago.