In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain's oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century's dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison's haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven 'mad-doctors' described here.

LRB 6 March 1997 | PDF Download