A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane

The words of the insane are often dismissed as incoherent. Yet many men and women who are labeled mad or schizophrenic reveal startling insight into their own condition while condemning the callousness of a society that shuns them. Stories are related here of some two dozen people who endured severe mental illness, from medieval Englishwoman Margery Kempe who bore her husband 13 children against her will, to Dresden judge Daniel Schreber, tormented by hallucinations of a feminine soul that he came to accept as a sign of his higher mission. Some patients, like composer Robert Schumann, harnessed their inner demons to creative ends; others experienced madness as a religious ordeal; still others, fully articulate, railed at those who confined them to asylums.