ABSTRACT
Focusing on the politics of madness in times past, historians have been repudiating many time-honoured readings of the subject. The 'Young Turks' amongst the scholars, mobilizing what the late Peter Sedgwick dubbed an 'anti-history of psychiatry', offer iconoclasm. Teleological and 'tunnel' history are out. Practitioners, theories, and movements are to be rated not according to their place in the psychiatric pantheon, but critically and neutrally, in historical context. The mix of depth, detail, and diversity reveals a complex historical fabric, and raises again and again the problems historians must face in relating intentions to outcomes, science to ideology, knowledge to control, and the overt to the latent functions of actions and institutions. Research into the history of madness and psychiatry has made great strides in the last decade, not least in searching for deeper levels of meaning and interpretation, seen from viewpoints other than the psychiatric point of view.
