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9780415255394

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'Time has proved Madness and Civilization by far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness (and, above all the history of reason).' - Roy Porter

Michel Foucault's history of madness during the classical age - the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries - is far too esoteric for the general reader. Foucault, cutting himself off entirely from the structure of modern psychiatry, recreates the theories, the treatment, and the vocabulary of folly, unreason, and insanity as they existed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages until the Age of Reason. He considers two events as milestones: the creation of the Hospital General in 1657, and the great confinement of the poor of 1794, the former indicative of a body of thought which considered man's dispute with madness a significant confrontation with secret powers, the latter presaging our modern attitudes involving isolation and refusal to communicate. Monsieur Foucault concludes: The world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself by the excess of works like those of Nietzsche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud. And nothing in itself, especially no what it can know of madness, assures the world that such works of madness justify it. Madness & Civilization is to psychiatry what Mimesis is to literature. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Celebrated French thinker and activist who challenged people's assumptions about care of the mentally ill, gay rights, prisons, the police and welfare.

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