ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by acknowledging that the debate on the interpretation of lunacy reform, and more especially the work of some of those in the revisionist camp, has been the occasion for a significant advance in the historiography of psychiatry. Since this essay appeared, a number of others have sought to survey the historiography of Anglo-American psychiatry. The chapter was grateful for the incentive to think systematically about the recent historiography of psychiatry and for the opportunity to debate some of the fundamental interpretive issues with David Rothman. It begins by discussing a little more detail the work of David Rothman and Gerald Grob. The former is clearly the best-known American exponent of the revisionist, or social control, approach to lunacy reform; the latter, the most tenacious and sophisticated defender of a modified form of the more traditional wisdom. For centuries that apathy had remained unchallenged, but when nineteenth-century humanitarianism joined with a more scientific understanding of insanity it diminished.
