ABSTRACT
To understand madness in Latin America as a scholarly inquiry one must flesh out the ways that mental illness became a problem for both state and civil societies, and how many nations turned to psychiatry for solutions over the course of the long nineteenth century. This chapter presents an exhaustive investigation of the insightful and important work on the history of madness and psychiatry on Latin America produced both inside and outside the region. It engages a modest sample of notable works published within the past twenty-five years to understand convergences and divergences between and among Latin American sites and to argue that the "domestication of madness", to borrow historian Andrew Scull's term, was part of many modernization processes. The chapter explores how historians of Latin America have been influenced by the texts, and how they have specifically used the language of public health to understand madness and psychiatry.
