Mad with Freedom - (Jules and Frances Landry Award) by Élodie Edwards-Grossi (Hardcover)

About the Book

"âElodie Edwards-Grossi's Mad with Freedom explores the largely unknown social history of racialized theories on insanity in the segregated South. Edwards-Grossi analyzes the medicalization of the Black body from the 1840s until the 1920s, revealing the politicization of science and psychiatric practices, notably concerning notions of citizenship, responsibilities, and civil rights. She begins when theories on insanity started to develop in the 1840s and continues until the 1920s, when they gradually became standardized and emerged as a distinct medical field. In doing so, Edwards-Grossi unites an institutional history of psychiatric spaces in the South that confined Black patients with an intellectual history of early psychiatric theories that defined the Black body as a locus for specific pathologies. Mad with Freedom explores how the use of race in studies on insanity and the brain in the 1840s and 1850s gave birth to politically charged theories on the differential biology and pathologies of white and Black brains. These theories, which emerged predominantly in southern medical schools, gained a second lease on life in the 1860s when anti-abolitionists used them to proclaim that Blacks became insane when confronted with the complexities of freedom, thus politicizing a controversial medical argument. Edwards-Grossi also reveals the localized and subtle techniques of resistance employed later by Black patients to confront medical power by either refusing to work or vocalizing their distress at being categorized as 'Black' and treated as such in these segregated institutions. Her work shows the continuous politicization of science and theories on insanity in the context of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. Mad with Freedom explores the gradual evolution of white and Black insanity theories into a more complex and autonomous science--following the standardization of international classifications in the 1890s--which southern asylums and hospitals gradually adopted. The study thus reveals the constant and complex negotiations at stake as physicians operated between the use of standardized categories of diseases and treatments on the one hand and localized, racialized classifications and theories on Black bodies on the other"--

Book Synopsis

The use of race in studies of insanity in the 1840s and 1850s gave rise to politically charged theories on the differential biology and pathologies of brains in whites and Blacks. In Mad with Freedom, Élodie Edwards-Grossi explores the largely unknown social history of these racialized theories on insanity in the segregated South. She unites an institutional history of psychiatric spaces in the South that housed Black patients with an intellectual history of early psychiatric theories that defined the Black body as a locus for specific pathologies. Edwards-Grossi also reveals the subtle, localized techniques of resistance later employed by Black patients to confront medical power. Her work shows the continuous politicization of science and theories on insanity in the context of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South.

Review Quotes

"Élodie Edwards-Grossi has written an important book on race and psychiatry in the American South. While a number of books over the past several years have begun a much-needed reexamination of the history of psychiatry through the lens of race, Edwards-Grossi has moved the field forward in significant ways. . . . Mad with Freedom is extensively researched, well argued, and lucidly written. It is an excellent addition to the growing body of scholarship on race, mental illness, and psychiatry in United States history."--Journal of Southern History

"Edwards-Grossi expands the historiography on anti-Black racism in the US by analyzing the intersection of white supremacy and the evolving field of psychiatry in erecting a supposed biological basis for deviant Black behavior that served to justify slavery and then Jim Crow practices between 1840 and 1940."--CHOICE

"Mad with Freedom is a pathbreaking work that speaks to readers today about the significant intersectionality of race and medicine."--Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom

"A work of stunning originality, smart, deeply researched in both primary and secondary sources, and well written and accessible to readers inside and outside the academy."--Randy J. Sparks, author of Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World

"Edwards-Grossi smartly crosses disciplinary boundaries in her examination of anti-Blacknesses pervasiveness in psychiatry. This brilliant book should be read by those persons interested in understanding the political legacies of medical racism."--Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

"In examining diverse institutions, physicians, and racial theorists across the South, Mad with Freedom provides a temporal and geographic breadth that separates it from previous books on constructions of Black people's mental health. In short, Edwards-Grossi has written a historiographic touchstone for the study of racism and psychiatry in the United States."--Christopher D. E. Willoughby, coeditor of Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery

"This well-crafted study demonstrates that the politics of psychiatry cannot be disentangled from the history of Black freedom struggles."--Rana A. Hogarth, author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840

About the Author

Élodie Edwards-Grossi is associate professor of sociology and American studies at IRISSO, Paris Dauphine University, France.