cover image Mad Travelers

Mad Travelers

Ian Hacking. University of Virginia Press, $39.5 (239pp) ISBN 978-0-8139-1823-5

The curious history of a now defunct Victorian-era psychiatric disorder is the jumping-off point for a reflection on the relationship between mental illness and its cultural context by Hacking, a philosopher who has written on the phenomenon of multiple personality disorder (Rewriting the Soul). In a series of four essays originally delivered as the 1997 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, Hacking closely analyzes the history of the dissociative fugue, a malady that enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1890s, particularly in France. Its symptom was compulsive bouts of walking in a state of complete forgetfulness of one's identity. The most celebrated fugueur was one Albert Dadas, a young gasworker from Bordeaux whose walks of up to 70 km a day took him as far afield as Algeria and Russia. By 1909, the disorder had all but vanished from the attention of the medical community, effaced by the demise of the hysteria diagnosis of which it was a subset. In this thoughtful but sometimes tiresomely discursive volume, Hacking analyzes the ""ecological niche"" that briefly allowed this illness and its diagnosis to flourish, combining details from the political and social contexts in which it was embedded along with excerpts from the doctor's chronicles of the Dadas case and anecdotes from medical history reaching from ancient Greece to the present. It would behoove us, Hacking writes, to think about how some of today's hot diagnoses--multiple personality disorder, PMS, ADD--might be equally niche-dependent. Yet, in his view, that would make them no less real. (Nov.)