Mind-Forg'd Manacles explores attitudes towards and treatments for madness in the age before the mass asylum and the emergence of the psychiatric profession. It aims to show how vernacular culture and Christian doctrine had traditionally offered explanations of insanity and how these views were displaced by the secularizing mind of the Enlightenment. It explores early social policy towards the insane and how this led to the piecemeal development of lunatic asylums. It also looks at the theoretical and practical aspects of psychiatric therapies.