A Year in Books/Day 56: Masters of Bedlam

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  • Title: Masters of Bedlam The Transforming of the Mad-Doctoring Trade
  • Authors: Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey
  • Year Published: 1996 (Princeton University Press)
  • Year Purchased: 1997-1998
  • Source: A hand-me-down from a friend.
  • About: ‘Masters of Bedlam’ offers up biographies of pioneering British ‘mad-doctors’. It is an interesting combination of social and psychiatric history, and a harrowing journey into 19th century asylums. It’s bleak stuff but you come away with respect and appreciation for those who worked against the odds to change a horrible system.
  • Motivation: This is one of the odder, more compelling volumes in the British History section of my library. My friend knew that I would appreciate it more than she did.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 270: “Another segment of the profession, the proprietors and medical staff of private asylums, escaped the stigma that attached itself to salaried employees of poor law institutions, but only at the cost of incurring their own unwelcome set of disabilities. To be sure, this portion of the marketplace for the services of alienists tended to be far more lucrative-at least for those who possessed the large capital sums a suitable physical plant and staff required-but it was indelibly contaminated by its overtones of trade and the endemic suspicions among the well-to-do about the motives of those who ran such establishments.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

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