The Patient’s Turn Roy Porter and Psychiatry’s Tales, Thirty Years on

The Patient's Turn Roy Porter and Psychiatry's Tales, Thirty Years on Yes, I am ill.But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from the sane.Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up here like scapegoats for all the rest?You, your assistant, the superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably inferior to every one of us morally; why then are we shut up and you not?This past year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Roy Porter's seminal 1985 article, 'The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from Below'. 1 Few works in the history of medicine have received so enthusiastic a reception.Porter's call to reclaim the voice of the voiceless has had an extraordinary echo, becoming not only a necessary reference but also a classic trope.This is especially the case among historians of psychiatry.In a field where patient narratives have long formed their own subgenre, shedding light on these hitherto unheard stories taps into popular fantasies probed by Porter himself -images of gothic madhouses and their gloomy inhabitants; whispers and cries; dark corridors encased in windowless walls, their interiors mirroring the mind gone astray. 2 So ubiquitous is this imagined space that some have recently proposed to create an independent research area dedicated to 'Mad Studies'.3 Fetishised, mythicised, ostracised, the psychiatric patient has emerged as an unlikely protagonist, capturing the scholarly, cultural and artistic imagination alike.Yet recent assessments suggest that Porter's call has not fully been heard.The history of the patient remains 'curiously underwritten' in several areas, some have claimed.4 The authors would like to thank Stephen T. Casper and Mark S. Micale for their insightful comments on this article.Earlier versions of this piece were presented by the first author at the Psychiatry and Culture in Historical Perspective Working Group (Yale) and by the second author at the 'Quelle histoire pour la médecine et la science?Dialogues autour d'une oeuvre' seminar (Institute of the History of Medicine, Lausanne -IUHMSP).Thanks are due to the participants of these events for bringing forth new ideas, especially Matthew Gambino and Mical Raz (Yale) and Vincent Barras and Francesco Panese (Lausanne).Finally, the authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.This work was made possible by a Banting

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.