Madmen : A Social History of Mad-houses, Mad-doctors and Lunatics

What was it like to be insane in the Georgian England of Mary Wollstonecraft and Coleridge (himself afflicted with madness?) How were our eighteenth-century ancestors confined and how were they treated by the fledgling psychiatric ''profession''? Indeed, how was the most famous mad person of the century - Shelley''s ''old, mad, blind, despised king'' George III - treated before his final descent into senility in 1808? Best-selling popular historian Roy Porter looks at the bizarre and savage practices of mad-doctors treating those afflicted by ''manias'', ranging from huge doses of opium, blood-letting and cold-water immersion to beatings, confinement in cages and blistering.

The author reveals how Bethlem - the London asylum created to care for the capital''s mentally sick - was riddled with sadism and embezzlement, and if that wasn''t dehumanising enough, jeering, ogling sightseers were permitted entry - for a fee of course.