In this insightful book, Andrés Ríos Molina makes important contributions to the history of the Mexican Revolution, the history of the asylum, and the social history of psychiatry in Mexico and Latin America. This richly documented study succeeds in presenting the everyday life and experiences of the patients at the Manicomio General de la Castañeda during a particularly tense and challenging moment of Mexican history: the final years of the Porfirio Díaz regime and the armed phase of the revolution (1910 – 20).
Ríos Molina draws upon recent studies by María Cristina Sacristán that have examined the transformations of psychiatric ideals, ideas, and practices in Mexico from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, on Cristina Rivera Garza’s insightful studies of life inside La Castañeda, and on Jonathan D. Ablard’s examination of Argentine psychiatric hospitals, as well as on numerous novel and classic historical reconstructions...
