ABSTRACT
The conventional account of the history of psychiatry goes something like this: despite some ups and downs and false starts, there has been slow but steady progress from the unenlightened days when lunatics were untreated or even tortured in places like Bedlam for the amusement of the public to our present more advanced state of knowledge. During the nineteenth century there was a gradual shift from a primitive view of madness as caused by supernatural agencies to a more sophisticated medical view, with psychiatry becoming accepted as a standard part of medical training.
