Gerold Sedlmayr: The Discourse of Madness in Britain, 1790–1815. Medicine, Politics, Literature

• Ian Copestake

The example of the madness and treatment of King George III provides an initial demonstration of the interrelationship between the discursive fields of medicine, politics and literature that the study focuses upon. Individual medical cases cross-over into public histories, demonstrating the lines of incursion caused by overlapping discursive fields. In order to investigate the fields of knowledge across which madness is stretched, and which it is not only constituted by but challenges due to the nature of its evasion of categorisation and definition, necessitates adopting an interdisciplinary approach. The author’s approach, as set out in the introduction, is specifically Foucauldian, but the lense provided by Foucault is based less on his own writings about madness than it is on the importance of his work for understanding the notion of discourse.