Christina Ramos has won the Cheiron Book Prize for her work on the history of the San Hipόlito hospital.
Christina Ramos, assistant professor of history, has won the Cheiron Book Prize for "Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment" (University of North Carolina Press). The international society for the history of behavioral and social sciences awards the prize every other year to an outstanding monograph in the history of the social, behavioral, and human sciences.
Ramos' book is a history of San Hipόlito, a hospital that cared for the mentally disturbed in Mexico City from 1567 to 1910. The Cheiron award committee described the book as “enriched by case studies of individual patients drawn from the hospital archives as well as from those of the Inquisition and the secular courts.” The committee lauded the book’s exploration of the role of the regular clergy in the detection and treatment of mental illness.
This is the third prize for “Bedlam in the New World.” The Alfred B. Thomas Book Award gave it an honorable mention in March, and in April it won the Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize.
