ARTHUR BURNS: Our main focus at the moment in the transcription
project is the medical papers associated with George III.
One of the things we all think we know about George III
is that he was "mad" and that this madness was
one of the key facts affecting his kingship, which
of course, extended a remarkably long time.
But actually many of us have not gone much further
behind that general sense that he was a mad king--
asking in what way precisely was he mad?
How much of his career as monarch was he mad?
And what effects did this have and on whom?
I think many people are quite surprised
to discover that actually for a large part of his career
as monarch, George III was not in any sense suffering
from mental illness.
The most famous bout which occurred in 1788 to 1789,
which became the subject of Alan Bennett's famous play--
The Madness of George III, which many of us
get our initial knowledge of the subject.
In fact, George right about six months,
he also suffered brief recurrences in 1801 and 1804.
And then after 1810, by which time he was very old
and was suffering from other significant illnesses,
he gradually succumbed to a more developing mental disorder
which partly blended mental illness with the effects
of aging, and senility, and dementia
in a rather unfortunate cocktail that made his last years
something of a misery.
So that final decade of his life,
he was significantly affected by it.
That's of course why we had a regency in the Prince Regent
at that time.
More generally, the rest of his career,
it was episodic and quite short lived
periods, in which he was most clearly suffering
the effects of mental illness.
And what was that mental illness?
Well, at the moment, there's some division
among scholars on that.
Prevalent theory for much the last 25 years
has been that George suffered from porphyria, which
was a physical disorder which had mental effects,
and which was particularly associated
with the psychiatrists Ida Macalphine and Richard
Hunter who put forward this theory in a very important book
written in the 1960s called George III and the Mad-business
The main competing explanations--
he was for suffering from a mania, some form of bipolar
disorder, which Timothy Peters has
recent been advocating in his recent writings on this topic.
And I don't think we're going to solve that issue ourselves
through working on the Georgian Papers.
But we, in fact, can begin to address
other aspects of George's illness, which perhaps have
been rather neglected because of the focus
on the question of what it was he was actually suffering from.