In this paper I explore the geography in the ideas of one 19th-century psychological physician, Thomas Laycock, seeking to show how his understanding of ‘madness’ rested upon an ‘imaginative historical geography’ that explained the contents of a mad person's consciousness as reversions to the mental worlds of other peoples living in other periods and places. I reconstruct Laycock's ideas about memory, notably what he understood by ‘ancestral memory’ rooted in ancestral times and spaces, and I relate these ideas to his deeper conceptualisations of the time – space fabric of creation. I also examine Laycock's approach to the letters and drawings of one unnamed artist – patient, showing that it is possible from other sources to give this patient a name (William James Blacklock) and even a ‘voice’ of sorts; and I suggest that Laycock was guilty of failing to engage properly with this evidence, yet also of overinterpreting it at the same time. Acknowledging the dangers of ‘presentism’ in this paper, I critique how Laycock's ideas captured ‘otherness’ in a grid of ‘sameness’ largely indifferent to the very different, perhaps unknowable, imaginings present in madness (and in all who depart from established norms). My contribution should be taken as a circumspect effort to write a ‘critical and effective history’ inspired by Foucault's claims in the introduction to The Order of Things (1970, Tavistock Publications, London) about the relationship between ‘the Same and the Other’.
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