Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (review)

R. A. Houston. Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland. Oxford Studies in Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. xi + 450 pp. Ill. $90.00 (0-19-820787-5).

Insanity is among the most elusive of all the illnesses that historians investigate. It is hard enough for any two scholars to agree on definitions of insanity in our own culture, let alone to try to identify and understand it in the past--whatever "it" may be. Is it a disease like anthrax? Is it socially constructed, like race, class, and gender? Do we do people in the past, or in our own day, a service or an injustice by privileging their own perceptions of "madness"? Should we chart the development of specialized institutions for the insane, or should we question the need for them? How can we judge past ages by our own twenty-first-century perceptions in this field, when we have fought hard against presentist judgments in other areas of history? On the other hand, how can we not judge them? These and other broad questions are raised by R. A. Houston.

Madness and Society is intended as a "social history of the perception of mental incapacity" (p. 9) in Scotland from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. The bulk of the source material comes from inquests carried out by civil courts to determine whether a person was capable of carrying out his or her own affairs. These inquests were part of the regular judicial procedure of the Scottish courts, and were generally initiated by a family member to "prevent the loss and dissipation" of the alleged lunatic's "goods and possessions" (p. 94). If an individual was found by the jury to be either "fatuous" (mentally incapable) or "furious" (violent or liable to become so), the court would appoint a guardian to look after the affairs of the family and estate.

The first two chapters, on methodology and on sources, deserve a wide readership. Houston gives a comprehensive and judicious account of the historiography of "madness" and firmly positions his own work within the recent scholarship of social history. He does not gloss over, but rather seeks to draw out, the complexities inherent in his sources: their accuracy, the intentions of family members with respect to allegedly incapable relatives and their property, the "furious" or "fatuous" person's own perceptions of the proceedings. Scholars working with similar sources will profit from careful reading of these two sections.

The rest of the book is organized thematically. Chapters deal with patterns of madness, such as gender, age, and marital status; with contemporary ideas about what constitutes "madness" and its complement, "sanity"; and with the language used both by the allegedly insane and by those who spoke about them. The chapter on "Madness and Religion" provides a nuanced analysis of the relationship between insanity and religious language that will be of interest to scholars of Enlightenment attitudes toward "enthusiasm." Indeed, one of Houston's most compelling points is that attitudes about madness reveal much about attitudes about sanity: "this is a book," he argues, "which is, in the final analysis, mostly concerned with just those people whose capacity was not questioned" (p. 8).

Though supplemented by asylum case records and other pertinent documents, the source material appears too limited at times to fully support the broader interpretive issues raised by the book. The thematic approach means that the same case may appear in several different chapters to illustrate several different themes, and the alert reader may wonder if it can really bear all that weight. Nor does it appear possible to extrapolate from these detailed case studies to other countries or medical cultures. Still, this book is a valuable contribution to the social history of medicine both for the questions it raises and for the answers it provides.

Lisa Rosner
Richard Stockton College

...