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A man roared at three children in the street. They ran off laughing, but then the man lurched into the Moroccan café where I was sitting and grabbed glasses of water off table after table, gulping them down and spilling most of it over his naked chest. We all sat in silent astonishment. Then two waiters hustled him round the corner, out of sight. There was a meaty thud, followed by crying and the sound of someone running away. That, said another waiter, was a madman. For most of history, the mentally ill were like that man: part of everyday life, not hidden from sight in hospitals and homes. As Roy Porter makes it clear in Madness: A brief history (Oxford University Press, £7.99), the control of what was seen as mad or abnormal behaviour was the responsibility of the family or community. The medicalisation of mental illness came about only recently. Fascinating, harrowing and excellent, Porter’s book also challenges Michel Foucault’s theory that the madhouse was entangled with the rise of the bourgeois work ethic.