'My insanity in the year 1783', by C.S. Andresen (1801).

The literature of the past has included self-reports by the mentally ill since before Roy Porter reminded us that their views and experiences constitute an important document for historians of psychiatry. The value of these self-reports can be enhanced if their potential biases and informational power are duly determined. This Classic Text concerns a self-report of a form of periodic madness written by an eighteenth-century Danish vicar. It shows how the same document can be presented in a more or less neutral fashion by a medical historian (Maar) or used as 'evidence' for some 'ontological' view of madness by a clinician (Rasmussen).