Body: | Undertaker of the mind:
John Monro and mad-doctoring in eighteenth-century England
Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull
2001 AD
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Introduction:
"Monro's attendance (as well as his father's) on Alexander "the Corrector"
Cruden, the famous compiler of a Bible concordance that re-mains in print
to this day, brought him notoriety of a different sort: a torrent of
published criticisms from the disaffected patient that constituted one of
the first examples of a persistent tradition of protest literature directed
against the claims of mad-doctoring (and, later, psychiatry) to be engaged
upon a therapeutic enterprise. The case is examined here (in chapter 3) as
part of the tangled set of relationships between religion and insanity in
this period: in particular, between those who appeared to suffer from this
especially problematic admixture, and the doctors, divines, and laymen who,
alternately, ministered to and vilified them. The Monros' tendencies to
stigmatize religious enthusiasts as crazy, and their medical treatment of
Methodist madmen, was to bring down opprobrium on their heads from the
movement's leaders, John Wesley and George Whitefield. (Sympathy for
popular religious enthusiasm was in rather short supply among the
ultra-orthodox "Bethlemeical" physicians, with their family history of high
Anglican, Tory, and Jacobite sympathies.)" (Undertaker of the mind: John
Monro, Jonathan Andrews, Andrew Scull, 2001 AD, p xv)
"John Monro was without question one of the most famous mad- doctors of his
generation. Besides his position at Bethlem Hospital, he was also a major
figure in the emerging private "trade in lunacy" 5 that was so notable a
feature of eighteenth-century England's burgeoning consumer society. Monro
attended Bethlem at a time when the hospital's custom of exposing the
insane to the eyes of sightseers reached its apogee. In the last years of
his tenure as its physician, the practice was radically curtailed-though
not at his initiative-after a wave of public, literary, and media
protest. Recognized by contemporaries as a leading authority on insanity,
Monro's close social connections with members of the aristocracy and
gentry, as well as with medical professionals, politicians, and divines,
ensured for him a significant place in the social, political, cultural, and
intellectual world of his time." (Undertaker of the mind: John Monro,
Jonathan Andrews, Andrew Scull, 2001 AD, p xiv)
(Undertaker of the mind: John Monro, Jonathan Andrews, Andrew Scull, 2001
AD)
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