ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that this rise in the number of mad folk accounted for the abrupt development of medical interest in lunacy at the beginning of the century and for the rapid publication of a series of early-nineteenth-century medical treatises on insanity. Accordingly, it offers the sketch of a rather different version of events, one that leaves but a minute place for the microbes, even though it insists that insanity was indeed increasing over the course of the nineteenth century. Edward Hare's recent Maudsley Lecture raises again the interesting question of whether or not this surge reflects a true increase in the incidence of mental illness in nineteenth-century England. Hare does dispute, which attributed much of it to the development of more expansive view of madness. As Hare notes, the chapter suggests that asylum doctors' professional self-interest provided one set of motives for the adoption of an expansionary view of madness.
