“When is travelling mad?”, asks Ian Hacking in Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Mental Illness.
You may have had occasion to ask yourself a similar question in the last two years, but after a period during which our wanderlust has necessarily been curbed, this is a book worth discovering: the effect on one man of being unable to stop travelling.
Comprising a series of four lectures with associated notes, the book explores the story of Albert Dadas, a gas fitter from Bordeaux, who in 1887 became the first diagnosed case of ‘hysterical fugue’, the sudden, compulsive need to walk, without farewells, without planning, often without money or identity papers, not knowing who he was or why he travelled, only where he was going next.
Not for Albert mere morning strolls or day-trips. His walks took him from Bordeaux to Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Vienna, Algiers, even Moscow and Constantinople. Once home, Albert struggled to remember where he had been, but under hypnosis would recall the detail of lost days and weeks, sometimes years.
“It all began ‘one morning last July when we noticed a young man of twenty-six crying in his bed in Dr. Pitres’ ward. He had just come from a long journey on foot and was exhausted, but that was not the cause of his tears. He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him; he deserted family, work and daily life to walk as fast as he could, straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometres a day on foot, until in the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison.’”
So wrote Dr. Phillippe Tissié in Les Aliénés Voyageurs, sparking an explosion of compulsive fugueur diagnoses which spread across France, to Italy, Germany and Russia, before all but disappearing as a psychiatric disorder after 1909.
Hacking uses Albert’s case to suggest that physical symptoms can occasionally find social and cultural homes, or “ecological niches” as he describes them, that allow a particular disorder to blossom at a given time, in a given place. He uses this idea to explore why the diagnosis of fugueur was contained in both geography and time, and to question the reality of more contemporary disorders and afflictions.
This sympathetic and fascinating book contains Albert’s own accounts of his life, relationships and journeys; extracts from observation diaries written by his doctors, as well as photographs of Albert and maps detailing his extraordinary travels.
One of the most absorbing aspects of the book is Hacking’s description of the evolving social norms in late 19th century France, and Bordeaux in particular. He concludes that, at the time, one did not need to be unwell “to find in yourself an obsessive need to leave Bordeaux.”
If you find in yourself an obsessive need to travel during 2022, we suggest this is a volume worth packing. Along with your passport etc, etc.
