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The Air Loom Gang
Mar. 1st, 2016 02:44 pmProject read more non fiction is go, starting with the above recommendation from Oliver. This rather odd little book is part biography of James Tilly Matthews, considered by some to have had the first documented case of paranoid schizophrenia and John Haslam, his physician at Bedlam, and part social history of the way we view and treat mental illness.
It certainly gave me a new-found gratitude that my sojourn at the tender mercies of England's madhouses took place at the end of the 20th century rather than the 18th, although sad to say I can definitely recall shades of Haslam in some of the doctors I was unlucky enough to encounter as a youth. I did feel at points as though the writer were stepping slightly over the line between recording history and spinning narratives out of whole cloth, particularly when speculating about the events which preceded Matthews' committal, but I'm not sure whether that was just because it made for a more interesting story than could be fully justified by the primary sources, or as a deliberate device to echo Matthews' own meandering between implausible fantasy and a truth which was stranger than fiction. In any case, it was a thoroughly diverting read.
It certainly gave me a new-found gratitude that my sojourn at the tender mercies of England's madhouses took place at the end of the 20th century rather than the 18th, although sad to say I can definitely recall shades of Haslam in some of the doctors I was unlucky enough to encounter as a youth. I did feel at points as though the writer were stepping slightly over the line between recording history and spinning narratives out of whole cloth, particularly when speculating about the events which preceded Matthews' committal, but I'm not sure whether that was just because it made for a more interesting story than could be fully justified by the primary sources, or as a deliberate device to echo Matthews' own meandering between implausible fantasy and a truth which was stranger than fiction. In any case, it was a thoroughly diverting read.
