Undertaker of the Mind

"As visiting physician to Bethlem Hospital, the archetypal "Bedlam" and Britain's first (and for hundreds of years only) public institution for the insane, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791) was a celebrity in his own day. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull call him a "connoisseur of insanity, this high priest of the trade in lunacy." Although the basics of his life and career are well known, this study is the first to explore in depth Monro's colorful and contentious milieu. Mad-doctoring grew into a recognized, if not entirely respectable, profession during the eighteenth century, and so many generations of Monros were affiliated with Bethlem that they practically seemed to serve by divine right. Their rule there may have been far from absolute, since attending physicians were in reality employees of the governors who controlled public hospitals, but in the same period John Munro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous.". "What the authors make clear is that Monro, a serious physician neither reactionary nor enlightened in his methods, was the outright epitome of the mad-trade as it existed then, esteemed in some