Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

Author:Michel Foucault [Foucault, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83310-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

VI

DOCTORS AND

PATIENTS

THE therapeutics of madness did not function in the hospital, whose chief concern was to sever or to “correct.” And yet in the non-hospital domain, treatment continued to develop throughout the classical period: long cures for madness were elaborated whose aim was not so much to care for the soul as to cure the entire individual, his nervous fiber as well as the course of his imagination. The madman’s body was regarded as the visible and solid presence of his disease: whence those physical cures whose meaning was borrowed from a moral perception and a moral therapeutics of the body.

1. Consolidation. There exists in madness, even in its most agitated forms, an element of weakness. If in madness the spirits are subjected to irregular movements, it is because they have not enough strength or weight to follow the gravity of their natural course; if spasms and convulsions so often occur in nervous illnesses, it is because the fiber is too mobile, or too irritable, or too sensitive to vibrations; in any case, it lacks robustness. Beneath the apparent violence of madness, which sometimes seems to multiply the strength of maniacs to considerable proportions, there is always a secret weakness, an essential lack of resistance; the madman’s frenzies, in fact, are only a passive violence. What is wanted, then, is a cure that will give the spirits or the fibers a vigor, but a calm vigor, a strength no disorder can mobilize, since from the start it will be subject to the course of natural law. More than the image of vivacity and vigor, it is one of robustness that prevails, enveloping the theme in a new resistance, a young elasticity, but subjugated and already domesticated. A force must be found within nature to reinforce nature itself.

The ideal remedy would “take the part” of the spirits, and “help them conquer the cause that ferments them.” To take the part of the spirits would be to struggle against the vain agitation to which they are subject in spite of themselves; it would also permit them to escape from all the chemical ebullition that heats and troubles them; finally it would give them enough solidity to resist the vapors that try to suffocate them, to make them inert, and to carry them off in their whirlwind. Against the vapors, the spirits are reinforced “by the most stinking odors”; disagreeable sensation vivifies the spirits, which in a sense rebel and vigorously flock to the place where the assault must be repelled; to this effect “asafetida, oil of amber, burnt leather and feathers will be used—that is, whatever can provide the soul with strong and disagreeable feelings.” Against fermentation, theriac must be given, “anti-epileptic spirits of Charras,” or best of all, the famous Queen of Hungary water;1 acidity disappears and the spirits regain their true influence. Finally, to restore their true mobility, Lange recommends that the spirits be subjected to sensations and movements that are both agreeable, measured, and regular: “When the animal spirits

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