Roy Porter was Professor of the Social History of Medicine, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. He died in March 2002. David Wright is Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences and Department of History, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

• Introduction Roy Porter; 1. Insanity, institutions and society: the case of Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, 1846–1910 Harriet Deacon; 2. The confinement of the insane in Switzerland, 1900–70: Cery and Bel-Air asylums Jacques Gasser and Geneviève Heller; 3. Family strategies and medical power: 'voluntary' committal in a Parisian asylum, 1876–1914 Patricia E. Prestwich; 4. The confinement of the insane in Victorian Canada: the Hamilton and Toronto asylums, c. 1861–91 David Wright, James Moran and Sean Gouglas; 5. Passage to the asylum: the role of the police in committals of the insane in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1900 Catharine Coleborne; 6. The 'Wittenauer Heilstätten' in Berlin: a case record study of psychiatric patients in Germany, 1919–60 Andrea Dörries and Thomas Beddies; 7. Curative asylum, custodial hospital: the South Carolina lunatic asylum and state hospital, 1828–1920 Peter McCandless; 8. The state, family, and the insane in Japan, 1900–45 Akihito Suzuki; 9. The limits of psychiatric reform in Argentina, 1890–1946 Jonathan D. Ablard; 10. Becoming mad in revolutionary Mexico: mentally ill patients at the General Insane Asylum, Mexico, 1910–30 Cristina Rivera-Garza; 11. Psychiatry and confinement in India Sanjeev Jain; 12. Confinements and colonialism in Nigeria Jonathan Sadowsky; 13. 'Ireland's crowded madhouses': the institutional confinement of the insane in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland Elizabeth Malcolm; 14. The administration of insanity in England, 1800–70 Elaine Murphy.

Review of the hardback: 'Dealing with the institutions and policies of countries with differing populations, traditions and cultures, these scholars largely eschew the angry and polemical writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Basing their analyses on archival data, they present nuanced and subtle interpretations that offer fresh insight into the mental-health policies of different nations.' Nature