Customers and patrons of the mad-trade

Jonathan Andrews, Jonathan Andrews, Andrew T. Scull

"This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients drawn from a great variety of social strata - offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. Monro was the physician to Bethlem Hospital and the second in a dynasty of Dr. Monros who monopolized that office for over a century. His hospital, the oldest and most famous/infamous psychiatric establishment in the English-speaking world, was the mystical, mythical Bedlam of our collective imaginings. But Monro also had an extensive private practice ministering to the mad and was the proprietor...

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