Breve historia de la locura

Perhaps the most sensible thing, given the variety of doctrines that support or deny the term, is to affirm that madness exists and that it takes the form that different societies attribute to it. In this fun book, written in a scrupulous chronological order, Roy Porter offers us a brief but exhaustive journey through the treatment of madness that different cultures have sought: from the civilizations of the great rivers, where trepanations of amazing skill were already being carried out. surgery, to Dr. Freud's couch, passing through the links between madness and sin imagined by Christians. Porter's interpretations of some descriptions of the Iliad or Oedipus Rex shed new light on the foundations of our civilization, and the reader sees such a number of ways to eradicate madness throughout history that there is no other choice but relativilize prejudices about it. In return, he gets an enlightening insight into the once-called "melancholic disease" and the realization that there is no society that does not need this disease to exorcise its own ghosts.