The Stone of Folly: Glimpses into the History of Madness

The Stone of Folly explores the concept of ’madness’ - what we would refer to as mental illness in modern terms - viewed from a wide range of historic and societal perspectives.

In centuries past, the insane, in confinement or in the care of family, were very poorly treated. Institutionalised patients were kept in squalid conditions, many of them chained-up for years. Multiple distasteful and shocking treatments, regarded as reprehensible in modern times, were advocated and carried-out by leading physicians to prevent insanity and cure the mind. Therapeutic measures included bloodlettings, emetics, purges, and ’coolings of the head’. Blistering of the skull with powerful blistering agents, advocated by eminent physicians, was widely used as late as the nineteenth century to heal those of unsound mind.

Intimidation, fear, and terror were often advised by renowned specialists in the treatment of madness and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clinicians searched for suitable methods of inducing the correct degree of fear in their treatments. In addition, various pervasive, often maiming and irreversible surgical procedures were performed to prevent or cure insanity.

To the modern reader this book provides an ethically and socially confronting historical record, comprising compelling and at times distressing facts. The Stone of Folly serves as a historical exposition of the ’growing pains’ within early mental health care and the subsequent slowly emerging discipline of psychiatry.