Dr. Gabriella Mondini, a strong-willed, young Venetian woman, has followed her father in the path of medicine. She possesses a singleminded passion for the art of physick, even though, in 1590, the male-dominated establishment is reluctant to accept a woman doctor. So when her father disappears on a mysterious journey, Gabriella's own status in the Venetian medical society is threatened. Her father has left clues -- beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes torrid, and often enigmatic letters from his travels as he researches his vast encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases. After ten years of missing his kindness, insight, and guidance, Gabriella decides to set off on a quest to find him -- a daunting journey that will take her through great university cities, centers of medicine, and remote villages across Europe. Despite setbacks, wary strangers, and the menaces of the road, the young doctor bravely follows the clues to her lost father, all while taking notes on maladies and treating the ill to supplement her own work. Gorgeous and brilliantly written, and filled with details about science, medicine, food, and madness, The Book of Madness and Cures is an unforgettable debut.

In the Mind of Madness is a collection of poetry that deals with different aspects of life. It starts with poems about what it is like in the mind of someone with bipolar depression and anxiety. Next there are poems about different types of love such as romantic and a mother's love. It then goes on to family and losing a loved one. The next section expresses poems related to one's faith. Finally at the end of the book, the poems capture snapshots of experiences that happen as life unfolds. As you read through these poems, you may relate to one or more of them. Some of them touch on difficult topics. As it says in the introduction, your stories are not all the same, but it helps to share the load. Just maybe, these words will make you think and provide a new outlook for you.

This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

An incredible publishing event: a philosopher draws on his own experience of madness as he takes readers on an unforgettble journey through the philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis--and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of academia, allowing philosphers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness--Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term--coexist, one mirroring the other. Drawing on his own experience of madness--two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart--Kusters argues that psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality.

This is a collection of essays on the history of Psychiatry. The final Volume III offers works around the psychiatry of the Asylum in countries such as Denmark, British India, Italy, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, France and America.

Collections of Madness: Amateur Experiments in Genius begins with e-mail conversations between three poets, Jane, Asil, and Nod, as they contemplate the answers to life's most difficult questions. Together, they decide to write a book and let their findings be known. The friends experience the universe together, but also individually on separate, bumpy paths. Jane, Asil and Nod share their insights, disillusionments, and life-changing epiphanies. In "Questions from the Lonely Girl," Jane Smith explores how she is learning to breathe her own eclectic beauty into the world. In Asil Nottarts's section, "socio-political, purely poetic, mindless ranting, and the creative process," her whimsical poetry asks such introspective questions as "Who am I, really?" and "Is there ultimately any difference?" In "neo/fight blues," poet Nod Nihill2 offers a wide range of verse including creative solutions for a world in crisis, the contents of a fortune cookie, and patterns of rejection. In Collections of Madness, the prolific words of Smith, Nottarts, and Nihill2 will entertain, enrage, excite, and transport you from the profound to the profane--and from the mundane to the extraordinary.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.