ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the meanings associated with "general paralysis of the insane" in the nineteenth century and autism in regard to disability. It examines the claims by scholars such as the anthropologist Emily Martin and the psychiatrist Kay Jamison as to the relationship between mental illness, disability, and creativity. With interest in mental illness from the standpoint of the growing field of disability studies comes a problem for the medical humanities. Madness has for centuries had legal and medical meanings; those meanings are more tangled and subject to political/ideological pressures than ever today in light of the framing of madness as a type of disability. In the 1960s, alternative perspectives on madness began to emerge in the works of Erving Goffman, R. D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz, offering a re-examination of the social causes of madness. Developmental disorders seem to have been bracketed in the search for a cure for a drug to cure madness.
