. . .FnAnchorv1_10_165" href="#Footnotev1_10_165">165 In Germany recognised idiots and madmen were not seldom punished with great severity, and even with death, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.166 One of the darkest pages in the history of European civilisation may be filled with a description of the sufferings which were inflicted upon those miserable beings up to quite modern times.167 Many of them were burnt as witches or heretics, or treated as ordinary criminals. For unruly and crazy people, who nowadays would be comfortably located in an asylum, whipping-posts and stocks were made use of. Shakespeare speaks of madmen as deserving “a dark house and a whip”;168 and Swift observes that original people like Diogenes and others, if they had lived in his day, would have been treated like madmen, that is, would have incurred “manifest danger of phlebotomy, and whips, and chains, and dark chambers, and straw.”169 The writings of 274Esquirol. . . Read More