Reviews for Madhouse

The average rating for Madhouse based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-07 00:00:00 Sheila Cook “We are all born mad. Some remain so.” - Samuel Beckett One of the scariest non-fiction books I have read in a long time and it is so shocking that it kept me up nights. This is the history of a nightmarish mental state hospital in Trenton, New Jersey in the 1920's and its young medical director, an unethical American psychiatrist named Henry Cotton. Dr. Cotton sincerely believed that all mental illness was caused by infection (germs and pus) of the body. He was not the only doctor that felt this way in this time period and people were desperate to find a cure for their mental illness or their loved ones. Dr. Cotton and his staff started to remove their patients teeth, spleens, colons, testicles, gall bladders, uteruses, stomachs and tonsils to avoid infection which “poisoned” the brain. (He also removed his own teeth, his wife Della and their two children Henry and Adolf to avoid becoming mentally ill.) 30 to 45% of his patients did not survive their surgeries. If the surgical team removed teeth and the patient did not improve, then they would experiment and keep removing organs until they were satisfied with the results. After all, Dr. Cotton had told his colleagues that there would be a 85 per cent cure rate of mental disorders if they did his advanced procedures. They ended up doing over 645 of these major organ removing surgeries on people and one out of three people died from them. But what makes the horrifying story so much worse, is when the good doctor is told that his germ theory is wrong and that not only are his patients not getting better but in fact they were dying in alarming rates. He decides to aggressively continue the surgery practice and attempts to shut down anyone who stands in his way. He lies and commits fraud about his test findings. His ego is so huge that he is willing to risk and ruin people's lives to become famous for his "advanced" theories and his career. And instead of reporting his findings to his peers, he shares them with newspapers. His male friends, for the most part (and in the same field) support him (despite the damning evidence) and no one dares to stands up to him. When one of his brave female colleagues get suspicious and writes a report that states that this is a dangerous, useless and an incorrect theory, it is buried by his fellow co-workers. These surgeries continue for another thirty years at the Trenton Mental State Hospital even after until his death of a heart attack in 1933. NOTE -Saddest ending-His two children (both sons) ended up killing themselves as adults. They like the hundreds of patients, their father had treated, had most of their teeth removed and one son had part of his colon removed. It is estimated that hundreds of people were maimed for life and hundreds had died. Fantastic and riveting book written by Sociology professor Andrew Scull. Any reader interested in the history of psychiatry, medicine or historical scandals will want to have this in their library. Four stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-26 00:00:00 Sara Dornbrook Would have made a great, long essay in a magazine, but this book is overwritten. There are some compelling pieces - the image of women get dragged into an operating room kicking and screaming, to have their teeth, tonsils, colons and ovaries removed (in order to remove an sepsis that could be leading to their insanity, in line with the mad doctor's theory) - that's pretty chilling. But I had to skim over bits detailing the doctor's trips abroad, his reception in the medical community, etc. If you read Chapter 9, you get the idea.