The Last of the Lunatics

A searing historical account of the treatment of the mentally ill in our society before the invention of tranquillizers.John Cawte looks back in amazement to his years as a young doctor in an Australian madhouse. He now recognises the people he treated in the early 1950s as ‘the last of the lunatics’.Anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs were unknown. Bursting asylums, housing an uproar of insanity, were wastelands of stigma and dread. ‘Management’ techniques ranged from straitjackets and padded cells to isolation and primitive shock treatments.Miraculously, Cawte’s case notes were saved from destruction. Rereading them after forty years, he was gripped by the horror they revealed and the questions they raised. Much has changed for the better. Many of the fearful illnesses he recorded have disappeared, treatments are vastly more effective and stigma has lessened. But his notes hold a surprising and challenging lesson—that temporary ‘asylum’ from the stresses of life is often all that a disturbed person needs for recovery.The Last of the Lunatics is rich and moving. The personal stories recorded by a perceptive young man have been filtered by experience and sharpened by telling literary references. Doctors, psychiatrists, those who remember and those who wonder about the human condition will be touched by this compassionate book.