"The author provides a sweeping yet poignantly detailed survey of the history of madness. Written in lively and clearly accessible prose and punctuated by colourful yet meaningful examples drawn from primary sources, Madness: A History offers an enticing introduction to students at all levels and to general readers. Part social history, part cultural history, and part intellectual history, Madness: A History conjures a richly rendered past that brings to the fore the lived experiences of the mad among us, while also engaging with the ways in which the most prominent philosophers and medical men defined and treated madness over the centuries. The author skilfully incorporates important historiographic debates and key concepts in ways that will interest experts, while not alienating less experienced readers."
Michael Rembis, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA
"Professor Pietkäinen has given us a comprehensive and highly analytic history of how cultures have understood madness. He questions the medical model of madness and shows how interpretations of mental illness have changed throughout history and across cultures. This book will greatly please anyone who teaches the history of psychiatry, but the book also will be fascinating for anyone interested in understanding human behavior."
Lisa Raskin, Amherst College, USA
"This candid, ambitious and compelling study offers us a highly readable, provocative, synthetisising account of madness' long and problematic history. Taking us from the Medieaval landscape of folly and demonic possession, through early modern and Enlightenment views and treatments of madness, to the birth of the asylum and the modern ages of psychopharmacology, anti-psychiatry and social care, this is as much a history of problematics in how madness was and is managed as of advances in how it was and is perceived. Seeking to situate rather than to anatomoise or pathographise madness, Pietikäinen phenomenologically elucidates how madness manifests itself or 'makes itself visible' in different contextual and temporal settings. He tells us tales less of progress than of unfulfilled hopes, less of mental illness and evolving diagnostic clarity than of the problems in constructions of being in terms of dependence and vulnerability, less of the commonalities in madness' manifesting than the manifold varieties of mental distress, wellness and being."
Jonathan Andrews, Newcastle University, UK
"[Extremely] well written... The original Finnish language version... won his native country's national literary award in 2014, and its virtues have carried over into an impressively lucid and wryly witty English prose that does credit to to the author's bilingual virtuosity... Pietikainen writes more emphatically from his perspective as a Professor of the History of Science and Ideas... [He] presents more about the philosophical and scientific backgrounds of his subjects and more clinical detail about actual cases of madness. His writing is clearly accessible to the intelligent layreader, but one senses that it is also directed at academic historians and history students... I can unconditionally recommend Pietikainen's book as offering an illuminating and insightful overview of its important subject."
Raymond Fancher, York University, Toronto, Canada, PsycCRITIQUES
"The author provides a sweeping yet poignantly detailed survey of the history of madness. Written in lively and clearly accessible prose and punctuated by colourful yet meaningful examples drawn from primary sources, Madness: A History offers an enticing introduction to students at all levels and to general readers. Part social history, part cultural history, and part intellectual history, Madness: A History conjures a richly rendered past that brings to the fore the lived experiences of the mad among us, while also engaging with the ways in which the most prominent philosophers and medical men defined and treated madness over the centuries. The author skilfully incorporates important historiographic debates and key concepts in ways that will interest experts, while not alienating less experienced readers."
Michael Rembis, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA
"Professor Pietkäinen has given us a comprehensive and highly analytic history of how cultures have understood madness. He questions the medical model of madness and shows how interpretations of mental illness have changed throughout history and across cultures. This book will greatly please anyone who teaches the history of psychiatry, but the book also will be fascinating for anyone interested in understanding human behavior."
Lisa Raskin, Amherst College, USA
"This candid, ambitious and compelling study offers us a highly readable, provocative, synthetisising account of madness' long and problematic history. Taking us from the Medieaval landscape of folly and demonic possession, through early modern and Enlightenment views and treatments of madness, to the birth of the asylum and the modern ages of psychopharmacology, anti-psychiatry and social care, this is as much a history of problematics in how madness was and is managed as of advances in how it was and is perceived. Seeking to situate rather than to anatomoise or pathographise madness, Pietikäinen phenomenologically elucidates how madness manifests itself or 'makes itself visible' in different contextual and temporal settings. He tells us tales less of progress than of unfulfilled hopes, less of mental illness and evolving diagnostic clarity than of the problems in constructions of being in terms of dependence and vulnerability, less of the commonalities in madness' manifesting than the manifold varieties of mental distress, wellness and being."
Jonathan Andrews, Newcastle University, UK
