Quotes from Roy Porter

Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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

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.

Out of 2,339 children received into London workhouses in the five years after 1750, only 168 were alive in 1755.

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.

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.