Bedlam in the New World

“Among the book’s strengths is the detailed exploration of a number of cases, including women and indigenous persons, from both the inquisition and criminal court records. The inclusion of illustrations drawn by one of the accused is particularly evocative of the challenges posed by these cases. The author’s skillful synthesis of how this work addresses multiple scholarly debates will also be much appreciated by readers.”—The Americas

“Ramos encuentra una justificación novedosa para estudiar la locura en esta etapa de grandes cambios. La originalidad de su libro también radica en el fino análisis documental y hermenéutico que realiza para mostrar rompimientos y continuidades en un proceso de transición de modelos.”

“[Through Bedlam in the New World] Ramos demonstrates a new reason to study madness in an era of substantial change. The originality of her work lies in her fine-tuned documental and hermeneutic analysis that reveals the breaks and continuities in a process of changing models.”–Hispanic American Historical Review

“A welcome addition to the literature on colonial medicine in Spanish America. It builds on the work of María Cristina Sacristán while uncovering the institutional transformation of a unique site. . . . concise, clearly written, and well researched.”—Reading Religion

“Ramos’s work will be of particular interest to scholars of religion and law, offering as it does evidence not only for reading colonies as ‘laboratories of modernity’ but legal archives as rich sources of such (multivalent, often ambiguous) work.”—Religious Studies Review

“A triumph . . . eloquent, provocative, highly‐synthesized, and compellingly theorized. Its brisk and accessible prose will lead to successful discussions with advanced undergraduates . . . [and will] doubtlessly be essential reading for historians of pre‐modern histories of medicine, the behavioral and mind sciences, colonial histories of medicine, and colonial Latin American history.”—Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

“Sharp, wonderfully analysed and researched, and delightfully written. . . . Ramos' incisive historiographical interventions are supported by her outstanding source base.”—Social History of Medicine

“A compelling study of the medicalization of madness. . . . Ramos provides a model of scholarship that will appeal to a wide range of scholars interested in histories of medicine.”—H-Sci-Med-Tech

“Bedlam in the New World is a well-researched and fascinating study that not only builds on existing scholarship on the histories of madness and psychiatry but also brings this history of colonial Mexico City into the conversation. . . . Ramos has convincingly reconstructed the world of San Hipólito and its broader environs on both the micro and meta levels.”—H-Disability

“Introducing San Hipólito as a site that might have been at the forefront of processes of medicalization of insanity both in Europe and the New World, this fascinating study presents an alternative to Eurocentric narratives of Enlightenment and mental disease.”—Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The University of Texas at Austin

“This superb book provides a beautifully written and impressively researched study of life inside New Spain’s San Hipólito Hospital for the mad. Reconstructing the hospital’s connections to colonial society, Christina Ramos illuminates how inquisitors and secular authorities, physicians and patients, and a host of other historical actors turned San Hipólito into a site of knowledge production. A landmark study in the histories of medicine, colonialism, psychiatry, and the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire.”— Adam Warren, University of Washington