Jeffrey Nagelbush wrote:

<< Some might find the article cited below interesting.  It gave me some ideas for 
class. MADNESS IN THE FIRST PERSON: Narratives of mental illness written by patients, 
rather than their doctors, offer extraordinary insights into the condition and its 
treatment, writes Gail A. Hornstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke 
College.
-- SEE http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i20/20b00701.htm>>

Gail Hornstein writes: "Psychiatry has a peculiar history compared with
the rest of medicine, partly because it is so closely tied to a particular
institution, the mental hospital. Madness has clearly existed throughout
human history, but there was no organized field of psychiatry before the
18th century, when what Foucault called "the great confinement" spread
across England and France."

In one of his books Roy Porter has denied that a "great confinement"
occurred in England in the way that Foucault contends. Sorry, I don't have
the reference, but in *The Killing of History* (pp. 145-148) Keith
Windschuttle cites scholarly evidence which rebuts Foucault's account in
relation to England, and French scholarship which demonstrates serious
chronological inaccuracies that undermine Foucault's psychiatric
"narrative" in relation to France.

Allen Esterson
London

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