Bedlam in the New World
A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment
By Christina Ramos
266 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, 5 tables
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6657-0
Published: March 2022 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6656-3
Published: March 2022 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6658-7
Published: December 2021
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- Paperback $34.95
- Hardcover $95.00
- E-Book $26.99
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Awards & distinctions
2023 Cheiron Book Prize, Cheiron, the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences
2022 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies
Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipólito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry’s beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness’s medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.
About the Author
Christina Ramos is assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Reviews
"Sharp, wonderfully analysed and researched, and delightfully written. . . . Ramos’ incisive historiographical interventions are supported by her outstanding source base."—Social History of Medicine
"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
“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
"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
“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
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