Reviews - Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

911 reviews for:

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

Antonia Hylton

4.35 AVERAGE

starla_anne's review against another edition

4.5

challenging dark emotional informative medium-paced

noirheart's review

5.0

challenging emotional informative sad fast-paced

katshark's review

3.0

I feel bad rating this book as only 3/5, because it is a very important story to tell. But for me personally at least, the narrative felt very disjointed and difficult to follow, so it wasn't the most enjoyable read.

cookiereadsswiftly's review

4.0

Excellent & comprehensive history of Crownsville Asylum in Maryland. I think the most surprising part of this book is that it isn’t all terrible. There are many stories in here about people who came and tried to make a flawed system better. As a person who has worked in social services I know exactly how daunting it can be when you realize how fucked these systems are. But person to person, some people came and changed it for the better. The shift from asylum to prison is also shocking, as is the info about the use of ppl for medical schools ( which reflects my recent read about Medical Apartheid).