Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade : The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London

A commentary on the 18th-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice - patients drawn from a great variety of social strata - offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in 18th-century London.The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors.

In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar.

They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and other successful doctors were practising, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.