Customers and patrons of the mad-trade

by Jonathan Andrews

"This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients drawn from a great variety of social strata - offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. Monro was the physician to Bethlem Hospital and the second in a dynasty of Dr. Monros who monopolized that office for over a century. His hospital, the oldest and most famous/infamous psychiatric establishment in the English-speaking world, was the mystical, mythical Bedlam of our collective imaginings. But Monro also had an extensive private practice ministering to the mad and was the proprietor of several private metropolitan madhouses. His case book testifies to the scope and prosperity of Monro