Queen Mary and Westfield College London University PhD Thesis ...

themselves', three years before this, both Battie and John Monro had, on the contrary, main-
tained as 'a good general rule' the exclusion of visitors 280 . Monro granted his patients sensibility
enough that they 'are generally conscious of ['their distemper'] themselves'281 . Madness had,
in fact, long been understood, not only as dulling or suspending natural sensation, but also as
rarefying the acuity of sensation. The growing currency of the new nervous stock of disorders,
from roughly the late seventeenth century, and their vindication under attack in the writings of
men like Cheyne, Blackmore and Mandeville, as authentic illnesses, worthy of sympathy, and as
affecting those of the liveliest faculties and 'most delicate Sensation', also worked to erode the
brutal, unfeeling image of the mad 282 . Buoyed up on this 'mania of...sensibility' 293 , contempo-
raries increasingly stressed that patients 'are not utterly unaffected' by the conduct of visitors,
and related emotive accounts of the distresses patients suffered at their hands4.
Of course, belief in the insensibility of the insane did not disappear with the end of
visiting. Physicians, like William Pargeter continued to repeat the ancient notion of 'Mani-
acs. ..insensibility to the power of cold' and to pain 285 . Such a conviction was hardly incompat-
ible with opposition to the exhibition of the insane, or with a belief in the common acuity of
the insane286 . Yet, theories of insensibility became more specificised in developing psychiatric
nosology, to cases of dementia and sensory deprivation287.
Nor did spectacle, or its advocates fade quickly. A correspondent to The Connoisseur
280 London Chronicle, 21-3 May 1761, 491; William Bathe, A Tre,ziise on Madness (London, 1758), 68-9, &
John Monro, Remark, on Dr. Batdie'. Tre.Ai.e on Madness (London, 1758), 38-9, in reprinted edn,, with intro.
by Richard Hunter & Ida Macalpine (London, Daw,on, 1962).
281 Remark., 38.
282 Cheyne, English Malady; Blackmore, Spleen; Bernard Mandeville, A Tree gise oJ Hppochondriack end Hg.-
Serick Passions... (London, 1711); Porter, Manacle., 47-53, 92-6, 176-84.
283 Burke, quoted by Porter, Manacle., 93.
284 London Chronicle, 21-3 May 1761, 491; Tryon, Dream. and Vision., 288-93; Richardson, Familiar LeUer,,
Itr cliii, 200-202.
285 Ob.ervaion. on Maniacal Disorder. (London, 1792), (ed.), Stanley W. Jadi.son (London, Routledge, 1988),
8, 138.
286
287 Hunter and Macalpine, P.gch,a fry, 603, 656, 732, 781, 837, 978, 986, 1024, and pas.ini under 'dementia' in
index.
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