Madness in the Age of Reason Anonymous College

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, humanity was beginning to discover and explore the connections and differences between the mind and the body, the body and the soul, the body and the surrounding world. It was during this period that “psychology was more neurological than it has been at any time” and the mind and the body became separated; a psychological problem of the mind was not always directly related to a physiological aspect within the body (Rousseau 112). One such exploration was that of madness and insanity. Originally thought to be the result of an imbalance of the four humours within the body, advances in science led to the discovery of a disconnect between the mind of an insane person and their body. What was it in the brain that led to an individual losing their sense of reality? This essay aims to explore various primary medical texts exploring the disease in comparison with Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, and whether the period’s fascination in madness was indeed scientific, or as Foucault suggests, cultural.

Writers, whether medical, creative, or philosophical, were searching for a means to understand insanity and where it came from, what it...