ABSTRACT
The medieval and early modern families who sought treatment outside of the household for their mentally disturbed relatives entered a pluralistic and competitive market for health care peddled by a range of healers from different social classes. Medieval and early modern madness was a domestic affair, since real institutional alternatives to household care only began to emerge in the eighteenth century. Richard Napier's casebooks show that early modern men and women blamed a diverse array of supernatural and natural causes for mental disorder. Pilgrimage and exorcism remained true methods of attaining release from mental disturbances or casting out malevolent supernatural entities in Catholic Europe throughout the early modern period. Napier's therapeutic eclecticism reflects that of the early modern market for health care. To cope with the anxiety-provoking vicissitudes of daily life as well as to cure the darkest or most violent mental disorders, men and women sought the help of academic physicians, empirics, surgeons, apothecaries, priests, exorcists, and saints.
