Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter Read Free Book Online Page A

championing of reason, however, mental order and disorder remained Sphinxian mysteries. Paradoxically, the riddles of psyche/soma affinities had been reopened by the great clarifications Descartes had struggled to effect. Addressing hysteria, the notable eighteenth-century physician William Heberden thus expressed a reluctance to dogmatize about the root-causes of such mysterious, chameleon-like conditions, on account of ‘our great ignorance of the connexion and sympathies of body and mind’. The attempts of later thinkers to resolve these intractable, even maddening, dilemmas will be explored in Chapter 6.

4 - Fools and folly
To reason with a lunatic is folly
    (George Man Burrows,
    Commentaries on Insanity, 1828)
     
    Stigma
    All societies judge some people mad: any strict clinical justification aside, it is part of the business of marking out the different, deviant, and perhaps dangerous. Such ‘stigma’, according to the American sociologist Erving Goffman, is ‘the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance ’. Stigmatizing—the creation of spoiled identity—involves projecting onto an individual or group judgements as to what is inferior, repugnant, or disgraceful. It may thus translate disgust into the disgusting and fears into the fearful, first by singling out difference, next by calling it inferiority, and finally by blaming ‘victims’ for their otherness.
    This demonizing process may be regarded as psychologically and anthropologically driven, arising out of deep-seated and perhaps unconscious needs to order the world by demarcating self from other, as in the polarized distinctions we draw between Insiders and Outsiders, Black and White, Natives and Foreigners, Gay and Straight, Pure and Polluted, and so forth. The construction of such ‘them-and-us’ oppositions reinforces our fragile sense of self-identity and selfworth through the pathologization of pariahs.
    Setting the sick apart sustains the fantasy that we are whole. Disease diagnosis thus constitutes a powerful classificatory tool, and medicine contributes its fair share to the stigmatizing enterprise. Amongst those scapegoated and anathematized by means of this cognitive apartheid, the ‘insane’ have, of course, been conspicuous. This polarizing of the sane and the crazy in turn spurred and legitimized the institutionalizing trend which, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, gathered momentum from the seventeenth century.

Witty fools?
    Folk wisdom has assumed that madness is as madness looks, a view which, in its turn, has been bolstered by artists and writers. In jokes and on the stage, the insane have standardly been depicted as strange and dishevelled—as ‘wild men’, with straw in their hair and their clothes threadbare, ripped or fantastical, or sometimes wearing barely a stitch. Further conventions have rammed such messages home. Just as the cuckold was known by his horns, so it was standard for the fool to be portrayed as disfigured by a stone protruding from his forehead, the ‘stone of folly’: the character flaw was thus written all over the face. Jesters and stage buffoons bespoke folly too, through their cap and bells, bladder and pinwheel, motley and hobbyhorse. Got up in a similar ‘uniform’ of their own, ex-patients of Bethlem Hospital tramped the highways, licensed to beg—their numbers being swollen by opportunistic sane mendicants who, like Edgar in King Lear, masqueraded as Bedlamites. They might sing for their supper, and their songs were even printed as ‘Bedlam ballads’:
I’ll bark against the Dog-Star
    I’ll crow away the morning,
    I’ll chase the moon till it be noon
    And I’ll make her leave her horning...
     

    9 John Donaldson, a poor idiot who lived in the eighteenth century and who made it his habit to walk before funeral processions at Edinburgh.
     
    In the culture of madness ‘reality’ and ‘representations’ endlessly played off each other. What a crazy