Amy Milne-Smith is an Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. Amy recently completed a monograph entitled "Out of his Mind: Masculinity and mental illness in Victorian Britain" which interrogates how Victorians made sense of the madman as both a social reality and a cultural representation. Even at the height of enthusiasm for the curative powers of nineteenth-century psychiatry, to be certified as a lunatic meant a loss of one’s freedom and in many ways one’s identify.
