Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (abridged in English as Madness and Civilization) was a revolutionary exploration of how our interpretations and experience of madness have changed over time, and how they’re not quite as ‘rational’ – or even more ‘rational – than they first appear. Everyone who was worked on the history of psychiatry since has worked in Foucault’s shadow.

He looked at history not as a history of administration, of records or politics, or what the psychiatrists said happened, but as a question of something was experienced and how what we think of as timeless actually changes over time.

He introduced difficult and exciting questions in both history and philosophy. Where might the voice of the excluded and silenced be heard? To what extent is madness a product of society’s attitudes towards it. ‘How,’ he writes ‘can a distinction be made between a wise act carried out by a madman, and a senseless act of folly carried out by a man usually in full possession of his wits? ‘Wisdom and folly are surprisingly close. It’s but a half turn from the one to the other.’

What does it mean to transgress? And how is it possible to reach something out of reach, something beyond reason. What does it mean to be mad? Insane? Crazy?Do these things exist outside the realms of reason?If they’re unreasonable how can they be understood by reasonable means?

Foucault looks at leprosy and the leper colonies, ships of fools, renaissance madness as a type of wisdom, the great confinement during the Enlightenment, different aspects of madness and how they were made sense of, and finally, William and Tuke and the birth of the asylum.

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Images from the Wellcome Collection ([ Ссылка ] ), CC BY 4.0, [ Ссылка ], via Wikimedia Commons

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