Mental illness (i.e., melancholy, madness)

In seventeenth-century English madhouses, it was “a therapeutic free-for-all. The protean symptoms of melancholy meant that virtually any substance could be tossed into a medicine to cleanse or strengthen the body, from the innocent (herbs, flowers, tree barks) to the hazardous (hellebore, laudanum) or downright bizarre (a wolf’s heart, to be carried around or eaten). . . . The medicalization of mental disorder also helped snuff out the legal penalties . . . that attended suicide. By the 1700s, over 90 percent of suicides were judged to have been non compos mentis, and the brutal practice of seizing goods from a deceased person’s family was almost obsolete” (Skuse, 213, 224).