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摘要

Leonard Smith is a social historian of psychiatry and mental illness in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has regularly produced academic books and research papers based on extensive and detailed investigations as well as solid analyses of these materials. One of his earlier books, Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (2007) was an important monograph on the history of English psychiatry, which examined the establishment of the asylum system in the Victorian era through the lens of developments in the long eighteenth century. In this new book, Smith has selected the subject of the private madhouse, revisited the issue of psychiatry and consumer society, and used his own research to build on major important works on the subject by pioneering historians such as William Parry-Jones, Michael MacDonald, Roy Porter and Andrew Scull.