DOCTOR PINEL AND THE MAD SEA CAPTAIN

REVOLUTIONARY TREATMENT OF THE INSANE IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

This comes from Aldous Huxley’s essay Madness, Badness, Sadness, first published in Esquire. Huxley describes in this piece the nightmarish treatment we have given the poor souls already caught in their personal nightmares of mental illness. Nakedness, chains, of course, beatings, of course, emetics called “brisk vomits,” screws to force open the mouths to facilitate feeding, even ghoulish operations such as excising the colon and female circumcision (Victorian cure for neurosis in young girls). In these institutions, sadists found a place where they could exercise absolute power over their victims. Speaking for myself, I don’t like to be reminded of mental illness—out of sight, out of mind, out of care. Almost as if psychotics threaten my little world with their lunacy.

Doctor Phillippe Pinel was appointed director of the Bicêtre Asylum in Paris during the French Revolution. Many residents were permanently chained. He made a request to the revolutionary government to allow the inmates to wander freely outside their cells. It was refused. Huxley comments that, apparently, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were not for lunatics. Finally, after repeated petitions, Pinel received permission. He decided to try the experiment on an English sea captain who had been in chains for forty years. The jailers were most afraid of him because he had killed one of them with his manacles.

Dr. Pinel entered the captain’s cell alone and said, “Captain, I will order your chains to be taken off and give you liberty to walk in the court if you promise to behave well and injure no one.’ ‘Yes, I promise,’ said the maniac. ‘But you are laughing at me…’” The chains were removed. When the captain tried to stand, he fell, having lost the use of his legs. He tried many times until, at last, he succeeded in achieving his balance. On walking into the courtyard and seeing the sky, he exclaimed, “How beautiful, how beautiful!” Huxley relates: “During the rest of the day, he was constantly in motion, uttering exclamations of delight. In the evening, he returned of his own accord to his cell and slept tranquilly.”

Pinel pioneered the treatment of the mentally ill, followed by many other courageous reformers, notably in the United States by Dorothy Dix. When we call somebody a pioneer, a reformer, a great man or woman, we often gloss over the actions and events that made him or her merit that title. Because of Pinel, a sea captain saw the sky for the first time in forty years and thought it was beautiful. No words of praise I can think of to apply to the deed or the man measure up to the deed or the man.