Book Review. The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times by Barbara Taylor

Barbara Taylor is a much-acclaimed academic historian. The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times is a meditation on her own experience with mental illness. Taylor was a patient at Friern— otherwise known as the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum— in North London during a period of transition within the field of psychiatric health care. It is from this unique perspective that she chronicles both her own emotional breakdown and the demise of the Victorian Asylum system in general.…