Wesley's views on madness

The Puritans of in the 17th century attributed mental and emotional illnesses to spiritual causes.  Their solutions were spiritual, prescribing prayers, repentance and faith.  In the 18th century some of the medical community began to consider these illnesses as having natural causes with medical treatments (Maddox, "Health," 12).   Using the rational approach of the Enlightenment, many diagnosticians thought all emotional illnesses were due to natural causes (Laffey, 470).

Although John began by considering madness as exclusively caused by demons, he read George Cheyne's The Natural Method of Curing the Disease of the Body and Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body in 1742, and began to examine the causes more closely (Maddox, "Health," 13).  Randy Maddox explains, "Soon thereafter he assessed a case of raving madness to be attributable simply to a fever.  He also began to record instances [in his journal] where prayer for deliverance was not sufficient for curing lunacy/madness.  Conversely, while he was initially sarcastic about the value of confining anyone in 'Bedlam' (i.e., Bethlehem [sic] Hospital), the first public asylum in London, he came to believe that institutional care of lunatics could be beneficial[.] ... While Wesley continued to remind readers in his later years that some physicians considered many cases of lunacy to be diabolical in origin, he came to consider most clear cases of insanity to be natural in origin, and assumed that -- in addition to prayer -- they should be treated by either professional or traditional medical means." (Maddox, "Health," 12.)

John made a clear distinction between madness caused by biology and madness caused by spiritual distress.  He felt clergy ought to be consulted in cases of emotional illness:

"Reflecting to-day on the case of a poor woman who had continual pain in her stomach, I could not but remark the inexcusable negligence of most physicians in cases of this nature.  They prescribe drug upon drug, without knowing a jot of the matter concerning the root of the disorder.  And without knowing this they cannot cure, though they can murder, the patient.  Whence came this woman's pain (which she would never have told had she never been questioned about it)?  From fretting for the death of her son.  And what availed medicines while that fretting continued?  Why, then, do not all physicians consider how far bodily diseases are caused or influenced by the mind, and in those cases which are utterly out of their sphere call in the assistance of a minister; as ministers, when they find the mind disordered by the body, call in the assistance of a physician?  But why are these cases out of their sphere?  Because they know not God.  It follows, no man can be a thorough physician without being an experienced Christian." (Wesley, Journal, v. 4, 313.)