The Madman in the Light of Reason. Enlightenment Psychiatry

Abstract

During the eighteenth century, western thinkers gradually won the freedom to study human beings and nature without thought-control or censorship by state or church. “Enlightened” reformers argued that the doctrine of natural rights applied to impaired as well as to healthy persons and they strove for decent custody and humane treatment of the insane. Pioneering physicians claimed the nervous and mental diseases as their field of study and intervention. The confluence of these efforts created “psychiatry.” This term did not come into usage until the nineteenth century, but the subject was delineated earlier. We will use it here, for convenience.