ABSTRACT
What physicians made of madness, and what those designated as suffering from it made of it, might be "two sides of a pattern that ultimately fails to cohere". Madness lost the untamed, revelatory status and the critical and tragic dimensions it had retained from classical and medieval times; if previously the mad had been kept at a remove, cast adrift, or left to wander, they were at least a feature in a shared landscape. In the years around 1800 the iconography of madness was defining a new and unsettling thematic register, most manifestly perhaps in the work of Goya. William Cullen's model of madness remained grounded in physiology: it was the result of "some inequality in the excitement of the brain" and nervous system; he coined the term "neurosis" to describe this. If madness was a mental disorder, and mental conditions were acquired not inherited, it was the mind that the physician or guardian must address.
