First Asylums Faucault Summary

Foucault rightfully regards the appearance of the first asylums a significant step forward for the whole world. It meant that the medical community accepted psychological diseases as a medical problem and basically announced that it was going to try to treat it. Madness did not seem like some kind of curse or other superstitious phenomenon nobody knew what to do with anymore. This point is delivered well by the author in the first part of the article. When Faucault describes how the asylums treated their patients, he turns to the models proposed and implemented by Samuel Tuke and Phillippe Pinel: Tuke’s idea was to define madness as the opposite of reason and try to battle it with reason; Pinel thought that madness should be isolated from religious …show more content…
Faucault spends a lot of time talking about Tuke’s model of the asylum as a family where the mentally ill were treated like children in need of nursing. In my opinion, this approach did not seem very respectful towards the patients, and it also discredited a concept of family in a way. The parallels between the “asylum family” and a “real family” sometimes would be taken too literally. Were children in normal families supposed to be regarded as mentally unstable just because they were children, and were parents considered sane just because they were their caretakers and adults? These questions were hard to avoid in such context. I think Faucault should have elaborated on this. The ethical implications in the matter were obvious. What I do like about Faucault’s narration, however, is the way he emphasizes the position of physicians in Tuke’s system. As Samuel Tuke founded his mental asylum, the York Retreat, he made physicians and therapists the ones in charge of treatment, starting with the admission of patients and ending with individual recommendations for every patient’s health state. I think that Faucault’s use of quotes in this part is most relevant. I also like the way he describes Tuke’s rather philanthropic aspirations: “It is not a scientist that homo medicus has authority in the asylum but as a wise man. If the medical profession is required, it is a juridical and moral guarantee, not in the name of science” (Foucault 159). The approach seems to be just as romantically sounding as it is agreeable: this way doctors treat the patients and try to assist them in overcoming their diseases, not research diseases by the example of the