Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

It's 10 o'clock, late enough to wander the alleys of Soho to go window shopping on Sochi Hall Street, or, if you're more adventurous, explore the sodium-lit corridor of the M62.

Late enough for a night walk, which, let me tell you, is not just walking about at night. Absolutely not.

We'll find out how it's been done in the British capital and what it means to do it later in the

programme when it's got that little bit darker. We're going to start though with the subject that

also deals in light and darkness, the history of madness and the history of mad doctoring, a

discipline that has declared new eras of enlightenment and identified past dark ages with more enthusiasm and regularity than any

other discipline. In the history of madness, the past is always bad, the promised future always

rosy, and the universe always poised to reorganise itself around a new idea. The humours,

the id, the lobotomy, hydrotherapy, ECT, Prozac, sensory deprivation, the suggestion that madness itself may not exist.

Since the 1980s, Andrew Skull has been one of the leading historians of madness,

and his new book must surely be his magnum opus.

Madness in civilisation is a monster survey of the condition, what constitutes it and what to

do about it from the time of Aristotle to the age of Xanax. Andrew Skull is plugged into the studio

on a line from San Diego. Andrew, one of the big questions that the book tackles is the long

history of the assumption that madness is a biological problem, that it's

located in the body. How did this assumption gain ground?

Well, it existed back as early as the ancient Greeks, although at that time it was just one of a number of possible interpretations of madness.

What's been interesting over the century, the centuries and millennia since, is how ideas have fluctuated,

and very often there's been no single set of meanings that I think would be dominant.

...