This book is based on an ambitious “archaeological” project by the French theorist and researcher Michel Foucault (1926–1984). The text is built upon the doctoral dissertation he wrote after several years of work in psychiatric hospitals. “History of Madness in the Classical Age” (1961) is an attempt to analyze and interpret the ideas about the nature of madness that existed in European culture from the 17th to the 19th centuries—undertaken to expose the genealogy of 20th-century psychiatric practice. Foucault, drawing on medieval medical treatises, popular superstitions of the past, and literary images, asks how the understanding of madness and society’s attitude toward it changed over time. How did madness become a disease subject to specialized treatment? And how did the “reasonable person”—someone who is able to judge the mad—come into being?