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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Awards & distinctions
2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize (Non Women & Gender Category)
2023 Philip Pauly Prize, History of Science Society
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
Honorable Mention, Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies
Shortlisted, 2023 Kenshur Prize, Center for Eighteenth-Century 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 HipĂłlito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenmentâa 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 psychiatryâs beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madnessâs 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.
For more information about Christina Ramos, visit
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Reviews
"Sharp, wonderfully analysed and researched, and delightfully written. . . . Ramosâ incisive historiographical interventions are supported by her outstanding source base."âSocial 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."âJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
âA 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.ââH-Sci-Med-Tech
"A welcome addition to the literature on colonial medicine in Spanish America. It builds on the work of MarĂa Cristina SacristĂĄn while uncovering the institutional transformation of a unique site. . . . concise, clearly written, and well researched."âReading Religion
"Ramosâs work will be of particular interest to scholars of religion and law, offering as it does evidence not only for reading colonies as âlaboratories of modernityâ but legal archives as rich sources of such (multivalent, often ambiguous) work."âReligious Studies Review
âIntroducing San HipĂłlito 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.ââJorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The University of Texas at Austin