Abstract
As we outlined in Chapter 2, in the Middle Ages the mentally ill were regarded in a similar fashion to those persons suffering from the plague and eventually came to occupy the position vacated by these patients (even, physically, the premises where they had been housed) when the great plagues remitted in Europe. After the Renaissance, madness became a problem for states that sought to organise « social space », by committing beggars, the poor, and the idle to asylums. Thus, for Foucault (1972), it was not the fact that the state wished to cure the ill that determined their massive hospitalisation, but rather the fight against idleness. We will see that this controversial statement is of interest when discussing present regulations regarding involuntary hospitalisation.
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Guimón, J. (2001). Prejudices in the General Population. In: Inequity and Madness. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0673-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0673-7_5
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