, insane and socially undesirable people would end at
The Madhouse. (Francisco Goya, 1812–1819) In
Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces the
cultural evolution of the concept of
insanity (madness) in three phases: • the
Renaissance; • the Classical Age; and • the
Modern era Middle Ages In the Middle Ages, society distanced
lepers from itself, while in the "Classical Age" the object of social segregation was moved from lepers to madmen, but in a different way. The lepers of the Middle Ages were certainly considered dangerous, but they were not the object of a radical rejection, as would be demonstrated by the fact that
leper hospitals were almost always located near the city gates, far but not invisible from the community. The relative presence of the leper reminded everyone of the duty of Christian charity, and therefore played a positive role in society.
Renaissance In
the Renaissance, art portrayed insane people as possessing wisdom (knowledge of the limits of the world), whilst literature portrayed the insane as people who reveal the distinction between what men are and what men pretend to be. Renaissance art and literature further depicted insane people as intellectually engaged with reasonable people, because their
madness represented the mysterious forces of cosmic
tragedy. Yet Renaissance intellectualism began to develop an
objective way of thinking about and describing
reason and unreason, compared with the subjective descriptions of madness from the Middle Ages. Moreover, Christian European society perceived such anti-social people as being in moral error, for having freely chosen lives of prostitution, vagrancy, blasphemy, unreason, etc. To revert such moral errors, society's new institutions to confine outcast people featured way-of-life regimes composed of punishment-and-reward programs meant to compel the inmates to choose to reverse their choices of lifestyle. The conceptual distinction, between the mentally insane and the mentally sane, was a social construct produced by the practices of the extrajudicial separation of a human being from free society to institutional confinement. In turn, institutional confinement conveniently made insane people available to medical doctors then beginning to view madness as a
natural object of study, and then as an illness to be cured.
Modern era The
Modern era began at the end of the 18th century, with the creation of medical institutions for confining mentally insane people under the supervision of medical doctors. Those institutions were product of two cultural motives: (i) the new goal of
curing the insane away from poor families; and (ii) the old purpose of
confining socially undesirable people to protect society. Those two, distinct social purposes soon were forgotten, and the medical institution became the only place for the administration of therapeutic treatments for madness. Although nominally more enlightened in scientific and diagnostic perspective, and compassionate in the clinical treatment of insane people, the modern medical institution remained as cruelly controlling as were medieval treatments for madness. In the preface to the 1961 edition of
Madness and Civilization, Foucault said that: ==Reception==