Cruden's Times and Insanity

Postscript to my recent post on the life of Alexander Cruden (1699-1770).

We find it quite hard to imagine to imagine how people could found themselves so easily incarcerated in gaols or private asylums supposedly 'mad' or 'insane'. Julia Keay has an interesting comment on that fact.

She said that when one looks that earlier centuries that the mad and insane are treated quite differently from those unfortunates of the 18th century because in former times they were usually left alone.

When Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote his justly famous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) he took the view that melancholy was a complex phenomenon. For him it had physical, social, spiritual, biotic, mood and actions aspects to it. Burton saw melancholy (clinical depression) as related to sin and the devil but also realised that other matters contributed such as diet, fresh air, exercise, and amount of sleep. Burton also used the ancient idea of the four humours to explain depression: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood with depression being said to be an excess of black bile.

However, for him as an Anglican theologian and scholar at Oxford, what was important was the Christian teaching regarding the Fall of man into sin. Others of the time even regarded lunatics as supernaturally gifted!

But with the coming dominance of the Age of Reason and later the Enlightenment a different paradigm of human history became prominent; within this paradigm Reason was exalted and anything that smacked of God's intervention or the devil's or any supernatural power was regarded as superstitions. All of life was understood to be open to rational scrutiny.

Hence, English society became more intolerant of its insane members and began to lock them away. Laws to permit these imprisonments were first enacted in England in 1714.