“Pursued by Devils or Tories”

Early in The Lunatic and the Lords, Richard Schneider shocks his readers at least a little bit when he suggests that in bygone times when officialdom killed or tortured people for their words or actions, the intention was not punishment but cure. After referring to a 15th-century papal bull about witchcraft he writes this: “Regardless of how the symptomatology was interpreted, we must also realize that the so-called remedies of the day—even burning at the stake, drowning, and torture—were not seen as punishment but were performed to rid the host of the devil. In other words, for the most part these procedures were carried out by well-meaning ‘practitioners’.” Although some readers may find Schneider’s view of history too charitable, his main point is that the interplay between official justice and the mentally ill (many of those unfortunate subjects would now be diagnosed as mentally ill) has always been a challenge and not always well handled. What is interesting...