Mad Travelers

Ian Hacking was University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He held the Chair of Philosophy and History of Concepts at the Collège de France.

The philosopher Ian Hacking is one of those writers whose books leave readers with the sense that they have always understood what in fact they did not understand before they read his work—exactly my response to Mad Travelers. Here his subject is a short-lived epidemic of hysterical fugue, or compulsive wandering, that took place in Europe at the end of 19th century. Hysterical fugue, which afflicted the mad travelers of Hacking’s title, had all but vanished as a diagnosis by the early 20th century and is therefore an example of what he calls a ‘transient mental illness.’ It was limited to a specific time and place or, in a term the author borrows from biology, to an ‘ecological niche’ that nurtured it. The argument is elegant and persuasive, one that Hacking applies to contemporary culture as well, citing anorexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as possible products of our own ecological niches. In Mad Travelers, Hacking transforms hysterical fugue from an obsolete medical curiosity into a parable about psychiatry.