SOURCE: Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Review of The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, by Elaine Showalter. Women's Studies 13, no. 4 (1987): 390-96.

In the following review, Scheper-Hughes praises the “original and exciting” subject material in The Female Malady, despite citing flaws in Showalter's analysis of schizophrenia.

Foucault's brilliant social history of western madness [Madness and Civilization, 1967] opens with a compelling image, Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff, the “ship of fools”, in order to fix in the reader's mind a picture of madness as it was prior to the “Enlightenment” when the insane still circulated freely through society on land and sea, their incessant babbling forming the backdrop of everyday language and experience. Similarly, Elaine Showalter opens her daring account of the recent history of English madness [The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980] with Tony Robert-Fleury's painting of Philippe Pinel's freeing the insane at the Bicêtre and...