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Surveying a wide array of historical source material, Porter offers the reader a banquet of information concerning the ways in which mad people were regarded and treated in England from the mid-17th to the early 19th century. Porter sees the originality of his book as lying “less in presenting a body of fundamentally novel research…than in seeking to establish a coherent narrative and integrated analysis” based upon available material (p. ix).
Porter is little concerned with passing clinical judgments about who was truly “sane” or “mad.” Neither is he interested in translating the diagnostic categories of old into contemporary psychiatric jargon. His concern is principally “to recover the internal coherence of now unfamiliar beliefs about the mind and madness and to set them in their wider frames of meaning” (p. x). Porter's survey demonstrates that during the century and a half under consideration there was in England a plurality of frequently competing views about madness. He argues that subtle shifts in evaluations of madness—what was viewed as positive or negative, amenable to cure or a hopeless case, as culpable or blameless—arose