Abstract

An exhaustive, exhausting, difficult, and inspired history of the cultural experience of madness, from the late Middle Ages to the early Nineteenth Century. Foucault immerses himself in the actual evidences of the phenomenon of madness: literary and dramatic works, records of governments, hospitals, prisons, and religious institutions, and the expressions of philosophers and sages. The history of madness is the history of the gestures that define it-confinement, punishment, neglect, therapy. Foucault's final statement of the antinomies and the debilitating impoverishment of the modern attitude towards "insanity" and folly leaves one impatient for what is to come next from this unusual and impressive thinker.--C. D.