Madness and Civilization (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Michel Foucault
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: The Middle Ages to the twentieth century
- Setting: Western Europe, especially France, England, and Germany
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Abused persons, Mental illness, Ethics, Medicine, Human behavior, Mental institutions, hospitals or asylums, Psychiatry or psychiatrists, Reason or reasoning
Form and Content
A conventional history of insanity might take the form of a history of psychiatry that narrates the emergence, progress, and triumph of humane treatment and scientific knowledge of mental illness from the Middle Ages to the present. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault presents a counterhistory of madness. He maintains that treatment of mad people has become increasingly abusive, repressive, and insidious in modern times, silencing what was a vital creative dialogue between madness and reason in Western civilization during the Middle Ages and...
[The entire page is 2556 words long]
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