Madness: A Brief History (3 page)

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In this seventeenth-century biblical scene of Christ healing the sick, the dishevelled woman in the foreground is holding her hands to her eyes in a gesture of madness.

The witch craze which gathered momentum across 
Europe from the late fifteenth century, peaking around 1650, likewise viewed uncontrolled speech and behaviour as symptoms of satanic
maleficium
(malice) directed by witches who had compacted with the Devil. In the conflagration of heresy-accusations and burnings stoked by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, false doctrine and delusion formed two sides of the same coin: the mad were judged to be possessed, and religious adversaries were deemed out of their mind.

‘I was seiz’d with great Fear and Trembling’

Believers themselves personally experienced madness and despair as indications of sin, diabolical possession, or a lost soul. A high proportion of the autobiographical writings of mad people (see for example Margery Kempe and John Perceval, discussed below in Chapter 7) have been religious.

Born in Exeter in 1631 into a wealthy family of Anglican lawyers, George Trosse later looked back at his youth as a Sodom of sin—turning into a ‘very Atheist’, he had followed every ‘cursed, carnal principle’ which had fired his lusts.

Pricked by a ‘roving Fancy, a Desire to get Riches, and to live luxuriously in the World’, as he recorded in his autobiography, Trosse travelled abroad to enjoy the ‘unregenerate World; the Lusts of the Flesh, the Lusts of the Eyes, and the Pride of Life’, being led into ‘great Sins and dangerous Snares’, and indulging in ‘the most abominable Uncleannesses’ short of ‘compleat Acts of Fornication’. Even grave illness did not lead him to think on death and damnation, or on the merciful Providence which had spared him.

Eventually he returned home, a notorious sinner against all the Commandments, enslaved to a licentiousness which had hardened his heart. Crisis ensued. After one particularly gross drinking bout, he awoke hearing ‘some rushing kind of noise’ and seeing a ‘shadow’ at the foot of his bed. ‘I was seiz’d with great Fear and Trembling’, Trosse recalled. A voice demanded: ‘Who art thou?’ Convinced it must be God, he contritely replied, ‘I am a very great Sinner, Lord!’, and fell to his knees and prayed. The voice proceeded: ‘Yet more humble; yet more humble.’ He removed his stockings, to pray upon his bare knees. The voice continued. He pulled off his hose and doublet. Warned he still was not low enough, he found a hole in the floor and crept within, praying while covering himself in dirt.

The voice then commanded him to cut off his hair, and at this point he anticipated it would next tell him to slit his throat. Spiritual illumination now dawned: the voice was not God’s but the Devil’s! Knowing he had ‘greatly offended’, he finally heard a call: ‘Thou Wretch! Thou has committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost.’ Falling into despair—the sin against the Holy Ghost which was reputed to be unpardonable—he wanted to curse God and die, and his head exploded with a babel of clamouring voices, making a ‘Torment of my Conscience’.

Buffeted by further voices and visions, Trosse fell into a ‘distracted condition’. His friends, fortunately, knew of a physician of Glastonbury in Somerset who was ‘esteem’d very skilful and successful in such cases’. There they carried him by main force, strapped to a horse; he resisted with all his might, believing he was being dragged down into the ‘regions of hell’. Voices taunted: ‘What, must he go yet farther into hell? O fearful, O dreadful!’ The Devil, Trosse later recalled, had taken complete possession.

He identified the Glastonbury madhouse with hell, seeing its fetters as satanic torments and his fellow patients as ‘executioners’. Eventually, however, though long seeking ‘revenge and rebellion’ against God, he grew more tranquil, largely thanks to the doctor’s wife, ‘a very religious woman’, who would pray with him, until his ‘blasphemies’ began to subside. Finally ‘I bewail’d my sins’, and he was thought to have recovered enough to return to Exeter.

Alas! Like the proverbial dog to his vomit, he returned to his old ways. This time, however, the fight with the Tempter was in the open. He now applied to godly ministers for guidance in removing his ‘great load of guilt’. Carried once again to Glastonbury, he ‘rag’d against God’, believing that he had sinned once more against the Holy Ghost, but the doctor ‘reduc’d [me] again to a Composedness and Calmness of Mind’.

Even then, his regeneration was not complete, for his faith was but ‘Pharisaical’. Backsliding, he was induced to return for a third time to Glastonbury. Finally, and this time permanently, ‘God was pleas’d, after all my repeated Provocations, to restore me to Peace and Serenity, and the regular Use of my Reason’. A man reborn, Trosse went off to study at Oxford. With divine assistance, he was called to the ministry, and he became a pious Nonconformist preacher.

The Trosse who then penned his autobiography—a conversion narrative comparable to Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding
—had a well-defined religious concept of madness. Reason was walking in harmony with God, derangement that state of mind when the soul, diabolically assailed, blasphemed against the Almighty. Madness was thus a desperate, acute phase in the trial and redemption of souls, because it brought a sinner into a state of crisis, and provided the prelude to recovery.

Against the grain

The bloody excesses of witch- and heresy-hunting— over 200,000 people, mainly women, were executed during the witch craze—eventually bred official and public scepticism about demoniacal possession. An early medical expression of this doubt is contained in the
De Praestigiis Daemonum
[On the Conjuring Tricks of Demons: 1563] of Johannes Weyer, a medical officer from Arnhem in the Netherlands. Weyer warned how readily illness in the old, the solitary, the ignorant, could be mistaken for witchcraft. The Fiend could indeed influence human behaviour, Weyer conceded, but since his power was ultimately limited by God, those he was capable of afflicting were melancholics and others prone to disturbances of the imagination. Witches fantasized the enormities which they confessed, and their imaginings were the products of hallucinatory drugs or dreams. Likewise, the crimes of which they were accused—inflicting sudden death, impotence, crop failure, and other misfortunes—were purely natural disasters. Supposed witches were to be pitied and treated, not feared and punished.

Reginald Scot from Kent, author of the
Discovery of Witchcraft
(1584), trod in Weyer’s footsteps and similarly questioned the reality of witchcraft—it was chiefly to refute his scepticism that King James, an orthodox Scottish Presbyterian, wrote his
Daemonologie
(1597). From around that time Anglican leaders questioned supposed instances of demonic possession, fearing that such sensations played into the hands of Papists and Puritans: their manifestations were put down instead to fraud or the self-deluding fancies of zealots and the vulgar. For the same reasons the Anglican Church ceased to make use of exorcism.

Physicians too expressed their doubts—not generally about the
possibility
of supernaturally induced madness as such but about its
proof
in the particular instance. With three other London doctors, Edward Jorden was summoned in 1603 to testify in the case of Elizabeth Jackson, arraigned on a charge of bewitching the 14-year-old Mary Glover. The latter had begun to suffer from ‘fittes ... so fearfull, that all that were about her, supposed that she would dye’; she had become speechless and temporarily blind, and her left side was anaesthetized and paralysed. Classic symptoms: but was it
maleficium
or sickness?

Glover had first been treated by physicians from the Royal College, but when she failed to respond, they deemed, perhaps all too predictably, that there was something ‘beyond naturall’ in it. Jorden demurred, however, arguing for disease, and he defended his medical explanation in a book whose title staked his claims:
A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother. Written uppon occasion which hath beene of late taken thereby, to suspect possession of an evill spirit, or some such like supernaturall power. Wherein is declared that divers strange actions and passions of the body of man, which in the common opinion are imputed to the Divill, have their true naturall causes, a,nd do accompany this disease
(1603). Jorden named Glover’s condition the ‘suffocation of the mother’ (i.e., matrix or womb), or simply the ‘mother’: that is, ‘hysteria’. Such symptoms as digestive blockages and feelings of suffocation pointed to a uterine pathology. Relying on Galen’s teachings, he argued that irregularities of the womb bred ‘vapours’ which wafted through the body, inducing physical disorders in the extremities, the abdomen, and even the brain, thereby producing the paroxysms, convulsive dancing, etc., so often misattributed to possession, yet properly explained by ‘the suffocation of the mother’. Jorden’s prime concern was to establish a
natural
explanation.

Medical interventions like Jorden’s could exonerate a woman from being judged the Devil’s disciple, and her life might thus be spared. Its downside might then be to draw down on her the charge of being guilty of ‘imposture’—being a fake witch. In later centuries, ‘hysterical’ women were stigmatized much as ‘witches’ had been, though they escaped legal penalties: misogyny remained, only the diagnosis changed. In a revealing letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud noted how he could understand the witch-hunters of bygone times.

Enlightened opinions

Opinions like Scot’s and Jorden’s were to find increasingly receptive ears among educated elites. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) on the Continent and the Civil Wars in Britain (1642-51) stirred strong reactions against religio-political extremism, condemned as ruinous to public order and personal safety alike.

A barrage of invective was unleashed against Anabaptists, Ranters, Antinomians (those who believed that the Holy Spirit resided within them and that ‘to the pure all things are pure’), and other self-styled saints who assailed public order in church and state alike. Their anarchic teachings were denounced not just on grounds scriptural, theological, and demonological, but
medical
too: these puffed-up prophets were literally brain-sick, ‘inspired’ not with the Holy Spirit but with wind.

Doctors and their allies pointed to the affinities between the religious fringe and outright lunatics: did not both display glossolalia (speaking in tongues), convulsions, weepings and wailings, and similar symptoms? ‘Enthusiasm’ was read as a sign of psychopathology. Some likened ‘zeal’ to epilepsy; a surfeit of black bile was blamed by humoralist doctors; while the new mechanical philosophy suggested that religious swoonings and spasms could be inflicted by inflamed fibres, vascular obstructions, or smoky vapours ascending into the head from obstructed guts and clouding the judgement. On such grounds Thomas Willis—seventeenth-century Anglican, royalist, and coiner of the term ‘neurologie’—thus excluded the Devil: so-called possession was all a matter of defects of the nerves and brain. Especially after 1650, elites thus washed their hands of witchcraft: it was not a Satanic plot but individual sickness or collective hysteria; eighteenth-century magistrates similarly deemed converts who shrieked and swooned at Methodist meetings fit for Bedlam—John Wesley himself, by contrast, upheld belief both in witchcraft and in demonic possession.

In England, as late as the 1630s, a physician as distinguished as Sir Thomas Browne might give evidence in court backing the reality of witchcraft. In other parts of Europe, the demonological debates rumbled on longer. Around 1700, Friedrich Hoffmann, the great medical professor at Halle in Prussia, was at the thick of attempts to resolve that issue in the German-speaking lands. In Jena in 1693 a Dr Ernst Heinrich Wedel advanced the claim that ‘spectres are fictitious representations, against the law of nature’. Hoffmann for his part stated that the Devil acted upon witches through the animal spirits, and one of his students reaffirmed the Devil’s influence over both the mind and the body.

In the Dutch Republic, France, and Britain, all prominent physicians by Hoffmann’s time explained religious melancholy wholly naturalistically. Referring to the visions of Quakers and other sectaries, Dr Nicholas Robinson, an avid Newtonian, claimed they were mere madness, and arose from the ‘stronger impulses of a warm brain’. Dr Richard Mead’s
Medica Sacra
(1749) provided rational explanations for possession and other diseases traditionally credited to the Devil: such beliefs were ‘vulgar errors ... the bugbears of children and women’.

A generation later the Midlands practitioner and champion of enlightened thought Erasmus Darwin was aghast at the survival of popular belief in the workings of Satan. In his
Zoonomia
(1794) and elsewhere, he blamed the Wesleyans for preaching hellfire and damnation: ‘Many theatric preachers among the Methodists successfully inspire this terror, and live comfortably upon the folly of their hearers. In this kind of madness the poor patients frequently commit suicide.’ Himself an unbeliever, Darwin cited case histories of wretched sufferers whose ‘scruples’ had plunged them into religious madness, and thence to despair and death: