The question which this chapter focuses on can be put like this: what made it seem reasonable to introduce the concept of dementia praecox/schizophrenia as a specific mental disease around the end of the nineteenth century? Or, to put it another way, how was it possible for the concept of schizophrenia to emerge, and to be accepted, at that time? Within a traditional account of schizophrenia as a scientific concept, albeit an imperfect one, these questions are rather perplexing. Schizophrenia, surely, was introduced and accepted because it was a reasonable (if imperfect) way of thinking about bizarre behaviour. It emerged because Kraepelin ‘discovered’ it; it emerged as the result of a gradual process of more scientific, enlightened and humane treatment of the ‘mentally ill’ (cf. Jones, 1972). In this framework, the historical background to the introduction of ‘schizophrenia’, while interesting in itself, is not seen as central to the current study and alleviation of ‘mental illness’. But if we see the concept or idea of schizophrenia as a problem in the present, then it is not simply that conventional answers to questions about its emergence are problematic; we need also to pose different questions which may make little sense within the traditional account.