This work is a social history of McLean Hospital - temporary home to many of the troubled genuises of our age, and of the evolution of the treatment of mental illness from the early 19th century to today. Its landscaped ground, chosen by Frederick Law Olmsted and dotted with Tudor mansions, could belong to a New England prep school. There are no fences, no guards, no locked gates. But McLean Hospital is a mental institution - one of the most famous, most elite, and once most luxurious in America.