Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Page-Barbour Lectures) - Hardcover

Hacking, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813918235 ISBN 13: 9780813918235

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 1998

Synopsis

"It all began one morning last July when we noticed a young man of twenty-six crying in his bed in Dr. Pitre's ward. He had just come from a long journey on foot and was exhausted, but that was not the cause of his tears. He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him; he deserted family, work, and daily life to walk as fast as he could, straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometers a day on foot, until in the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison."

―Dr. Philippe Tissie, July 1886

Thus begins the recorded case history of Albert Dadas, a native of France's Bordeaux region and the first diagnosed mad traveler, or fuguer. An occasional employee of a local gas company, Dadas suffered from a strange compulsion that led him to travel obsessively, often without identification, not knowing who he was or why he traveled. He became notorious for his extraordinary expeditions to such far-reaching spots as Algeria, Moscow, and Constantinople. Medical reports of Dadas set off at the time of a small epidemic of compulsive mad voyagers, the epicenter of which was Bordeaux, but which soon spread throughout France to Italy, Germany, and Russia.

Today we are similarly besieged by mental illnesses of the moment, such as chronic fatigue syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The debate rages about which of these conditions are affectations or cultural artifacts and which are "real." In Mad Travelers, Ian Hacking uses the Dadas case to weigh the legitimacy of cultural influences versus physical symptoms in the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. He argues that psychological symptoms find stable homes at a given place and time, in "ecological niches" where transient illnesses flourish.

Using the records of Dadas's physician, Philippe Tissie, Hacking attempts to make sense of this strange epidemic. While telling his fascinating tale, he raises probing questions about the nature of mental disorders, the cultural repercussions of their diagnosis, and the relevance of this century-old case study for today's overanalyzed society.

About this title

About the Author:

Ian Hacking is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Rewriting the Soul.

From Publishers Weekly:

The curious history of a now defunct Victorian-era psychiatric disorder is the jumping-off point for a reflection on the relationship between mental illness and its cultural context by Hacking, a philosopher who has written on the phenomenon of multiple personality disorder (Rewriting the Soul). In a series of four essays originally delivered as the 1997 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, Hacking closely analyzes the history of the dissociative fugue, a malady that enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1890s, particularly in France. Its symptom was compulsive bouts of walking in a state of complete forgetfulness of one's identity. The most celebrated fugueur was one Albert Dadas, a young gasworker from Bordeaux whose walks of up to 70 km a day took him as far afield as Algeria and Russia. By 1909, the disorder had all but vanished from the attention of the medical community, effaced by the demise of the hysteria diagnosis of which it was a subset. In this thoughtful but sometimes tiresomely discursive volume, Hacking analyzes the "ecological niche" that briefly allowed this illness and its diagnosis to flourish, combining details from the political and social contexts in which it was embedded along with excerpts from the doctor's chronicles of the Dadas case and anecdotes from medical history reaching from ancient Greece to the present. It would behoove us, Hacking writes, to think about how some of today's hot diagnoses?multiple personality disorder, PMS, ADD?might be equally niche-dependent. Yet, in his view, that would make them no less real.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0813918235
• ISBN 13: 9780813918235
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 239