Notes on 'Diagnosing Madness'

Abstract

What kind of story could be conveyed about psychiatric patients and the practices of their confinement in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century? How could such an account be grounded? What theoretical tools and frameworks would allow for an apprehension of this situation, and within or across which disciplinary frameworks? Firmly situated in the field of rhetoric of science, Diagnosing Madness. The discursive construction of the psychiatric patient, 1850-1920 attempts such an account, “placing rhetorical analysis of the written word at the center of the web of cultural practices that made asylums possible in the nineteenth century”