The public reception of this title, first published in 1837, and the extraordinarily successful career of its author, W.A.F. Browne, a previously obscure if ambitious provincial surgeon and mad-doctor, are intimately bound up with the progress of the 19th century lunacy reform movement and the consolidation of the newly emerging profession of alienism in England and Scotland. First published in 1991 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, this edition is prefaced by a major critical introduction by Andrew Scull, which examines the impact of the book on the development of Victorian psychiatry at a time when it was beginning to emerge as an organised profession.