Grand Master of Bedlam: Roy Porter and the History of Psychiatry

In truth, the nearest this jazz and classical music aficionado got (as I recall) to being an actual MC, was dancing a fool's jig with his wife, Natsu Hattori, on the conference hall stage of the London Wellcome Institute, to the delight of onlookers and to the traditional tune of Tom o' Bedlam, rendered expertly by Vivian Nutton at the harpsichord. Tailor-made to underline Natsu's paper on the performative aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean representations of folly and madness, this highlight of the conference Roy organized to mark the publication of the multi-authored A history of Bethlem in 1997 exemplifies the way he combined demanding levels of scholarship with equally high grade entertainment. Addison-like, Roy regularly employed diversionary wit to efficacious educative effect.

Research Assessment Exercise, the dubious process by which UK universities' research is periodically monitored and rewarded/penalized by HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England).

See e.g. Jonathan Miller's “Madness” series, BBC 1, 1991, in which Roy made numerous appearances; Porter Roy , “The archive hour: Madness in its place” (London, BBC Radio 4, 2000); Porter , “In praise of folly”, BBC history, iii (2002), 12–17; Porter , “Being mad in eighteenth century England”, History today, xxxi (1981), 42–48; and Porter , “Bethlem/Bedlam: Methods of madness?”, History today, xlvii (1997), 41–46.

Porter Roy , Mind-forg'd manacles: A history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London and Cambridge, MA, 1987; paperback, London, 1990).

See e.g. Porter Roy , “The patient's view: Doing medical history from below”, Theory and society, xiv (1985), 175–98. See, also, Porter , “The patient in England, c. 1660-c. 1880”, in Wear Andrew (ed.), Medicine in society (Cambridge, 1992), 91–118.

One of his best early explorations of the mad voice is Porter Roy , “Bedlam and Parnassus: Mad people's writings in Georgian England”, in Levine George (ed.), One culture: Essays in science and literature (Madison, 1987), 258–84.

Porter Roy , The social history of madness: Stories of the insane (London, 1987; reissued, 1989). This book was also translated into Portuguese and Italian, but did not go into paperback until 1996.

Peterson Dale A. (ed.), Mad people's history of madness (Pittsburgh, 1982) was one of the first to gather together a collection of narratives from persons with experiences of madness and confinement.

E.g. Porter Roy , “Margery Kempe and the meaning of madness”, History today, xxxviii (1988), 39–44, 60–61.

E.g. Digby Anne , in Journal of the Historical Association, lxxiv (1989), 88–89. Auberon Waugh referred to the book in his Telegraph Saturday book review, “Votes cast in the name of madness”, as “a fraud”, because it was packaged rather like an anthology of writings by the mad.

E.g. Roy wrote the foreword for Ingram Allan (ed.), Voices of madness: Four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Thrupp, 1997). He was also a reader for the edition of and commentary on Dr John Monro's 1766 casebook, Andrews Jonathan Scull Andrew T. , Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: The management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2003).

Porter Roy , “The diary of a madman, 17th-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world”, Psychological medicine, xvi (1986), 503–13, based on his Squibb Lecture, Institute of Psychiatry, London, June 1985; reprinted in Murray R. M. Turner Trevor H. (eds), Lectures on the history of psychiatry: The Squibb series (London, 1990), 128–43.

Porter Roy , “The prophetic body: Lady Eleanor Davies and the meanings of madness”, Women's writing, i (1994), 51–63.

Porter , Manacles (ref. 4), 236–40, 243–4, 260, 262, 274, and Social history of madness (ref. 7), 35, 54–59, 151, 240.

Haslam John , Illustrations of madness (1810), ed. by Porter Roy (London and New York, 1988).

Porter Roy , Madness: A brief history (Oxford and New York, 2002), 1.

See e.g. Porter , Manacles (ref. 4), 2, 98, and Porter Roy (ed.), The Faber book of madness (London, 1991), i, 262–3.

See e.g. Porter Roy , “Hearing the mad: Communication and excommunication”, in De Goei Leonie Vijselaar Joost (eds), Proceedings of the 1st European Congress on the History of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care (Rotterdam, 1993), 338–52.

E.g. Porter Roy , “Expressing yourself ill: The language of sickness in Georgian England”, in Burke Peter Porter Roy (eds), Language, self, and society: A social history of language (Oxford, 1991), 276–99.

Shakespeare William , Macbeth, v (v).

Ingram Allan , The madhouse of language: Writing and reading madness in the eighteenth century (London and New York, 1991), chap. 3.

Foucault Michel , Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), transl. and abridged from Folie et déraison (Paris, 1961); Goffman Erving , Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates (New York, 1961; Harmondsworth , 1991); Rothman David J. , The discovery of the asylum: Social order and disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971; rev. edn, 1990); and Dörner Klaus , Madmen and the bourgeoisie: A social history of insanity and psychiatry (Oxford, 1981), transl. from Bürger und Irre (Frankfurt, 1969). For an early crystallization of Roy's differences with Goffman's (and Foucault's) vision of the asylum, see especially Porter Roy , “In the eighteenth century were lunatic asylums total institutions?”, Ego, iv (1983), 12–34.

See e.g. Porter , Social history of madness (ref. 7), 14.

Ibid., 17.

See Porter , Manacles (ref. 4), 8. His views are also endorsed by Scull Andrew , The most solitary of afflictions: Madness and society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London, 1993), 8, note 20.

For Roy's most focused critique of Foucault see Porter Roy , “Foucault's great confinement”, History of the human sciences, iii (1990), 47–54. For further commentary, see e.g. Porter , Manacles (ref. 4), 5–9, 110–11, 162–3, 225, 279–80; Porter , Social history of madness (ref. 7), 3, 14–16, 36, 54; Porter , “Madness and its institutions”, in Wear (ed.), Medicine and society (ref. 5), 277–301, pp. 281–3; and Porter , “Total institutions” (ref. 22). Roy's views were clearly influenced by Midelfort H. C. Erik , “Madness and civilization in early modern Europe”, in Malamont B. (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in honour of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia, 1980), 247–65.

Jones Colin Porter Roy (eds), Reassessing Foucault: Power, medicine and the body (London and New York, 1994).

See especially Porter Roy , “Was there a moral therapy in eighteenth-century psychiatry”, Lychnos, 1981–82, 12–26.

E.g. Scull , Most solitary (ref. 25), 61–62; Scull Andrew , “The domestication of madness”, Medical history, xxvii (1983), 233–48, reprinted in Scull, Social order/mental disorder: Anglo-American psychiatry in historical perspective (London, 1989), 54–79.

See e.g. Edward Shorter's wholehearted endorsement in A history of psychiatry: From the era of the asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York, 1997), 20. See, also, Leonard D. Smith's qualified leaning towards Roy's view in Cure, comfort and safe custody: Public lunatic asylums in early nineteenth century England (London, 1999). Busfield and Laffey disagree with Roy more substantially: Busfield Joan , Managing madness: Changing ideas and practice (London, 1986), 216; Laffey Paul , “Two registers of madness in Enlightenment Britain”, History of psychiatry, xiii (2002), 367–80.

See e.g. Suzuki Akihito , “Anti-Lockean Enlightenment? Mind and body in early eighteenth-century English medicine”, in Porter Roy (ed.), Medicine and the Enlightenment (Amsterdam, 1995), 336–59, and idem, “Dualism and the transformation of psychiatric language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, History of science, xxxiii (1995), 417–47.

E.g. Porter's Manacles (ref. 4) is replete with discussion of nervous afflictions. See also introduction to Cheyne George , The English malady (1733), ed. by Porter Roy (London and New York, 1991), and Porter Roy , “Il male inglese: La follia in epoca Georgiana”, Kos, ii (1985), 33–48.

Roy Porter, with Gilman Sander King Helen Rousseau George Showalter Elaine , Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley, 1993).

See e.g. Porter Roy Teich Mikuláš (eds), Fin de siècle and its legacy (Cambridge, 1990).

Dunant Sarah Porter Roy (eds), The Age of Anxiety (London, 1996).

Gijswijt-Hofstra Marieke Porter Roy , Cultures of neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War (Basingstoke, 2001); review by Davis Gayle L. , Social history of medicine, xv (2002), 525–7. Roy's contribution to this volume entails a typically reflexive reworking of his earlier analyses of nervousness during 1700–1900: “Nervousness, eighteenth and nineteenth century style: From luxury to labour”, ibid., 31–50.

Andrews Jonathan Briggs Asa Porter Roy Tucker Penny Waddington Keir , The history of Bethlem (London, 1997).

Bynum William F. Porter Roy Shepherd Michael (eds), The anatomy of madness: Essays in the history of psychiatry (3 vols, London and New York, 1985–88).

Porter Roy , “The rage of party: A Glorious Revolution in English psychiatry?”, Medical history, xxix (1983), 35–50.

Most notably Porter Roy , “Love, sex, and madness in eighteenth-century England”, Social research, iii (1986), 211–42.

E.g. Porter Roy , “The body and mind, the doctor and the patient: Negotiating hysteria” in Porter , Hysteria beyond Freud (ref. 33), 225–85.

Porter Roy , “Barely touching: A social perspective on mind and body”, in Porter Roy Rousseau George S. (eds), The languages of psyche: Mind and body in Enlightenment thought (Berkeley, 1990), 45–80.

See Roy's eloquent introductions to the following: Haslam , Illustrations (ref. 15), and its recent translation, Porter , Politiquement Fou: James Tilly Matthews (Paris, 1999); Trotter Thomas , An essay, medical, philosophical, and chemical, on drunkenness, and its effects on the human body (1804), ed. by Porter Roy (London and New York, 1988); and Cheyne George , English malady, ed. by Porter (ref. 32).

This journal was published until 2003 by Alpha Academic, in collaboration with the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Even better things are hoped for now the press ownership has changed hands to Sage.

E.g. Porter Roy , “Brunonian psychiatry”, in Bynum William F. Porter Roy (eds), Brunonianism in Britain and Europe (Medical history, Supplement 8; London, 1988), 89–99.

E.g. Porter Roy , “The drinking man's disease: The ‘pre-history’ of alcoholism in Georgian Britain”, British journal of addiction, lxxx (1985), 385–96. Roy also wrote an introduction to the English translation of Jean-Charles Sournia's path-breaking A history of alcoholism (New York and Oxford, 1990).

Berrios German Porter Roy (eds), A history of clinical psychiatry (London, 1995). Roy's informative accounts of various disease categories in their social settings include dementia, Parkinson's Disease, chorea and Huntingdon's Disease, 52–62, 113–22, but the most helpful are those on epilepsy and mood disorders, 164–73, 409–20.

E.g. Porter Roy , “Can the stigma of mental illness be changed?”, Lancet, ccclii (1998), 1049–50.

See Porter Roy , “Reason and madness in the French Revolution”, in Brown Leslie Ellen Craddock Patricia B. (eds), Studies in eighteenth century culture, x (East Lansing, Michigan, 1990), 55–80, and Porter , “‘Coming under the French influence’: The early history of mesmerism in England”, unpubl. typescript, London, 1985.

See the brief introduction in De Goei Vijselaar (eds), Proceedings (ref. 18).

Gijswijt-Hofstra Marieke Porter Roy (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam, 1998).

See also, e.g., Porter Roy , “Two cheers for psychiatry!: The social history of mental disorder in twentieth century Britain”, in Berrios German Freeman Hugh (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry (London, 1996), 383–406.

My thanks to German Berrios for alerting me to this point.

For examples of Roy's many forewords, see Ingram Allan (ed.), Voices of madness: Four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Thrupp, 1997); Logan Peter Melville , Nerves and narratives: A cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1997); and Clark David H. , The story of a mental hospital: Fulbourn, 1858–1983 (London, 1996).

See e.g. Roy's cover credits to Jan Goldstein's, Console and classify: The French psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 1987); Wright David Bartlett Peter (eds), Outside the walls of the asylum: The history of care in the community 1750–2000 (London, 1999); Bartlett Peter , The poor law of lunacy: The administration of pauper lunatics in mid-nineteenth-century England (London and New York, 1999); and Leese Peter , Shell shock: Traumatic neurosis and the British soldiers of the First World War (Basingstoke, 2002).

See e.g. Porter Roy , The Western medical tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge, 1995); Porter (ed.), The Cambridge illustrated history of medicine (Cambridge, 1996); Porter , “The greatest benefit to mankind”: A medical history of humanity (London, 1997); Porter (ed.), Medicine: A history of healing. Ancient traditions to modern practice (London, 1997); and Porter , Blood and guts: A short history of medicine (Harmondsworth, 2002). Most of these texts include engaging sections by Roy on the history of mental disorders, asylums and psychiatry. Roy also contributed a short section on madness to the Routledge dictionary of ethics, theology and society (London, 1995), 987–93.

Bynum William F. Porter Roy (eds), Companion encyclopaedia of the history of medicine (Cambridge, 1993), and Gregory Richard L. , Oxford companion to the mind (Oxford and New York, 1987).

See e.g. Porter Roy Teich Mikuláš , (eds), The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, 1981); Porter , The Enlightenment (London, 1990; 2nd rev. edn, Basingstoke, 2001); Yolton John W. Porter Roy Rogers Pat Stafford Barbara Maria (eds), The Blackwell companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1991); Porter , Medicine in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam, 1995); Black Jeremy Porter Roy (eds), The Penguin dictionary of eighteenth century history (London, 1996); and Porter , Enlightenment Britain and the creation of the modern world (Harmondsworth, 2000).

See e.g. Porter Roy , “Madness and the family before Freud: The view of the mad-doctors”, Journal of family history, xxiii (1998), 159–72, and Porter , “Madness and the family before Freud”, in Gijswijt-Hofstra Porter , Cultures of psychiatry (ref. 51), 257–83.

Roy was not the first to use this quote in a title. See Lenzer Gertrud , “Mind-forged manacles: Auguste Comte and the future”, in Times higher education supplement, 27 Jan 1978. Literary scholars have also inevitably been there before and after him. See Bandy Melanie , Mind forged manacles: Evil in the poetry of Blake & Shelley (Alabama, 1981); Tandecki Daniela , Mind-forg'd manacles: William Blake und das Moralgesetz (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1987); and Baum Joan , Mind-forg'd manacles: Slavery & the English Romantic Poets (Hamden, Conn., 1994).

For good examples, see Porter Roy , “‘The whole secret of health’: Mind, body and medicine in Tristram Shandy”, in Christie John Shuttleworth Sally (eds), Nature transfigured (Manchester, 1989), 61–84.

Porter Roy , ‘“The hunger of imagination’: Approaching Samuel Johnson's melancholy”, in Bynum Porter Shepherd (eds), Anatomy (ref. 38), i, 63–88.

See e.g. Porter , “Madness and the family” (ref. 59), where Roy culled evocatively from Burton. 64. Porter , Madness (ref. 16).

In this connection see e.g. Porter Roy , “Making faces: Physiognomy and fashion in eighteenth-century England”, Études anglaises, xxxviii (1985), 385–96.

See, e.g., Porter Roy , “Madness and society in England: The historiography reconsidered”, in Studies in history, iii (1987), 275–90. Lesser contributions include Porter, “Shutting people up”, Social studies of science, xii (1982), 467–76, and Porter , “Psychiatry pre-1800”, Current opinion in psychiatry, iv (1991), 738–42 and ibid., v (1992), 718–21.

Micale Mark S. Porter Roy (eds), Discovering the history of psychiatry (Oxford, 1994). See their comprehensive historiographical introduction to this book, “Reflections on psychiatry and its histories”, ibid., 3–36. For other of Roy's excellent historiographical surveys, see e.g. Porter , “History of psychiatry in Britain”, History of psychiatry, ii (1991), 271–80, and Porter , “Madness and its institutions” (ref. 26).

Porter Roy , “Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter: History between psychoanalysis and psychiatry”, in Micale Porter (eds), Discovering (ref. 67), 83–94.

Porter Roy , “Shaping psychiatric knowledge: The role of the asylum”, in Porter (ed.), Medicine in the Enlightenment (ref. 58), 256–73.

Porter Roy Wright David (eds), The confinement of the insane, 1800–1965: International perspectives (Cambridge, 2003). The jointly written introduction to this book is an agenda setting survey of the state of current work in the field.

Houston R. A. , Madness and society in eighteenth-century Scotland (Oxford and New York, 2000), 4.

See e.g. Small Helen , Love's madness: Medicine, the novel, and female insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford and New York, 1996), 38. Small's assessment refers to Porter's Manacles, and is also cited in Houston's Madness and society (ref. 71), 357 and note 5.

Porter Roy , “Introduction”, in Burke Peter Porter Roy (eds), Language, self, and society: A social history of language (Cambridge, 1991), 2.