Monetizing Madness

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1004

Hail, horrors! hail
Infernal world! and thou profoundest hell,
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by place or tie.--Milton

I wonder when it was that people began to institutionally capitalize the monetary value of madness?  People of course have been “mad” for as long as there have been people; but the issue of centralizing them, of locating people with mental disorders, or collecting folks who displayed far-ranging attributes of the norm, I think is relatively recent.  Certainly it is a more modern invention of capitalizing on madness, as “hospitals for the insane”, “institutions for the feeble-minded”, “lunatic asylums” and so on are mostly an invention of the 17^th century. 

In many instances these institutions were for-profit ventures, and most of these were run for the benefit of making money more helping the people who would be confined there.  It was certainly not pretty.

The conditions for being sent to one of these places varied from country to country, region to region, judge to judge.  Insanity was not a necessary condition, either—many wives who stood in the way of mistresses wound up conveniently out0of-the-way in mental institutions; it was also a way to gain control of a relative’s estate.

The later may be true in the very celebrated case of William Belcher, who spent seventeen years in a private asylum (from 1778 to 1795).  Belcher wrote (as “a victim of the trade of lunacy”) about his experience with vindictiveness and vitriol in his Address to Humanity: Containing a Letter to Dr. Thomas Monro, a Receipt to Make a Lunatic and Seize his Estate, and a Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (1796, which can be seen in full here).

Another famous case was that of John Perceval, who recounted his story in his 1838 book, A narrative of the treatment experienced by a Gentleman during a state of mental derangement designed to explain the causes and nature of insanity, and to expose the injudicious conduct pursued towards many unfortunate sufferers under that calamity.  Perceval did actually have some sort of something going on, a suspension of his normal facilities, as he says in the first lines of his book: “"In the year 1830, I was unfortunately deprived of the use of my reason. This calamity befel me about Christmas. I was then in Dublin. The Almighty allowed my mind to become a ruin under sickness - delusions of a religious nature and treatment contrary to nature. My soul survived that ruin.”  But the base of it all was  the seizure of his considerable property, against which he could barely fight.  Perceval continued his fight against the lunacy trade for the rest of his life (he died in 1876). As a matter of fact Perceval was one of the founders of one of the first patients’-advocacy groups, the very bouncily-named Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society. 

Evidently the was a certain porosness to the definitions of “normalcy” and “lunacy”, the distinctions between the two sometimes settled for a cool lump payment.