The Asylum

Abstract

Histoire de la Folie is structured around events; among them the following stand out:

• 1. the emptying of leprosaria at the end of the Middle Ages

• 2. the foundation of l’Hôpital Général of Paris in 1656

• 3. the ‘libration’ of the insane at the end of the 18th century by a Quaker reformer, William Tuke — who built for them a special ‘Retreat’ outside York — and by a medical reformer, Pinel, in France — who unchained ‘the ferocious madmen’.

All three events refer to the fact of internment — a binary division of the population and the exile of those placed on the other side of the dividing line to a self-enclosed domain. Yet the three institutions embodied different regimes of internment: motives behind internment were different, and so too were their internees and their internal regimes.