The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness
Laure Murat
Abstract
The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon explores for the first time, in archives and unpublished materials, the relationship between history and madness, ideology and pathology. “Ambitious monomania,” “revolutionary neuroses,” “democratic disease” are names of just some of the many “diseases” related to political convictions that French physicians discovered from 1789 to 1871. How can one read today this epistemological construction? Is history legible through registers of lunatic asylums and how? By investigating nineteenth-century medical cases and doctors’ observations, this book attempts to un ... More
Keywords: nineteenth-century France, Étienne Esquirol, history of psychiatry, lunatic asylums, monomania, madness, Napoleon, Philippe Pinel, revolutions
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 | Print ISBN-13: 9780226025735 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2015 | DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226025872.001.0001 |
