Foucault plus twenty: On writing the history of Canadian psychiatry in the 1980s

The untimely recent death of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, at the age of 57, serves as a sad reminder that twenty years have now passed since the publication in English translation of his seminal 1961 study Historie de la Folie. In the intervening years, and largely as a result of Foucault's provocative revisionism, the history of psychiatry has emerged as one of the most exciting and controversial growth areas of the “new social history”. Scholars, in both Europe and the United States, have begun a critical re-assessment of the history of “madhouses, mad-doctors and madmen” in post-Reformation Western society. In particular attention has focused on the origins and development of the lunatic asylum in the nineteenth century. Rejecting the long-held “Whig” explanation of the institution as one of the great nineteenth century “reforms”, revisionist historians have erected a new “social control” model in its place. Recently, however, this “new orthodoxy” of interpretation has itself come under attack as a second generation of asylum studies has begun to appear in print. Still confined, for the most part, to reviews and articles, this new work, less strident and dogmatic in tone than that of the “social control” historians, points to a more balanced and nuanced account of the nineteenth century asylum experience. Psychiatric history is once again in a state of flux and it seems highly unlikely that the decade of the 1980s will close without seeing the production of one or more new synthetic overviews of nineteenth century psychiatry to match those produced by David Rothman and Andrew Scull in the 1970s.