ABSTRACT
The therapeutics of madness did not function in the hospital, whose chief concern was to sever or to “correct.” And yet in the non-hospital domain, treatment continued to develop throughout the classical period: long cures for madness were elaborated whose aim was not so much to care for the soul as to cure the entire individual, his nervous fiber as well as the course of his imagination. The madman’s body was regarded as the visible and solid presence of his disease: whence those physical cures whose meaning was borrowed from a moral perception and a moral therapeutics of the body.
