Roy Porter > Quotes

“Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.”
― Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History

“Not least, the asylum idea reflected the long-term cultural shift from religion to scientific secularism. In traditional Christendom, it was the distinction between believers and heretics, saints and sinners, which had been crucial—that between the sane and the crazy had counted for little. This changed, and the great divide, since the ‘age of reason’, became that between the rational and the rest, demarcated and enforced at bottom by the asylum walls. The keys of St Peter had been replaced by the keys of psychiatry.”
― Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History

“In the culture of madness ‘reality’ and ‘representations’ endlessly played off each other. What a crazy world in which the poor had to pretend to be mad in order to get a crust!”
― Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History

“The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them together into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.”
― Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

“Out of 2,339 children received into London workhouses in the five years after 1750, only 168 were alive in 1755.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

“Of the thousands of medicaments in official use, few were truly effective: among these were quinine for malaria, opium as an analgesic, colchicum for gout, digitalis to stimulate the heart, amyl nitrate to dilate the arteries in angina and, introduced in 1896, the versatile aspirin.”
― Roy Porter, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

“Imperial domination spread. Slaves were the precious life-blood of the West Indian economy, where King Sugar reigned and in which £70 million had been invested by 1790. Under the asiento, British slave-traders transported a million and a half Africans to the Caribbean during the century: ‘All this great increase in our treasure,’ wrote Joshua Gee in 1729, ‘proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations.’ West African gold gave England the guinea. In 1787, Sierra Leone in West Africa was set up as a trial settlement of free blacks, as was New South Wales from 1788 for transported criminal whites. The future of English society was irreversibly being skewed by empire.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

“In J. H. Plumb’s words, in Georgian society, ‘without protection, the poor and the weak and the sick went under; the rich and the strong prospered’.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

“The Duke of Devonshire owned Hardwick Hall, Chatsworth, Bolton Abbey, Lismore Castle and Compton Place, and, in London, Burlington and Devonshire Houses. Prodigal peers and their heirs ran up astronomical debts – and mortgaging and other legal devices allowed them to do this without imperilling their estates.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

“The rural economies of most of ancien régime Europe were trapped in cycles of over-population and under-production: chronic indebtedness, exhausted soil, paltry grain yields, uneconomic fragmentation of holdings and population pressure spelt mass misery and periodic disasters. But the English had earned their pardon from this death sentence.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

“Thus, more of the ordinary person’s money got syphoned off into the Exchequer, where it largely financed war and paid the interest due to wealthy investors in the National Debt.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

“Conquest of Disease, The Conquest of Pain, The Conquest of Tuberculosis, The Conquest of Cancer, The Conquest of the Unknown and The Conquest of Brain Mysteries,”
― Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

“Under the 1799 and 1800 (anti-)Combination Acts, workers forming illegal combinations could be summarily gaoled for three months, after appearing before only one magistrate.”
― Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century