Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade

The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London, With the Complete Text of John Monro's 1766 Case Book

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by Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull

University of California Press

Due/Published December 2002, 450 pages, cloth

ISBN 0520226607

This book is a 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 he saw in the course of his private practice--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.

The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part 1. Managing Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London
1. Customers, Patrons, and Their Mad-Doctor
2. A Rare Resource: John Monro's Case Book
3. Profiling Patients and Patterns of Practice
4. The Craft of Consultation: Managing Patients and Their Problems
5. Diagnosing the Mad
6. Religion, Madness, and the Case Book
7. Treating Patients and Getting Paid
8. Being Mad in Eighteenth-Century England: Patients' Views of Their Own Illnesses
Part 2. John Monro's 1766 Case Book

Notes
Bibliography
Index