How do you deal with a madman? For a long time the answer was to beat him and chain him up in the dungeon. But in the more enlightened 18th century, pioneers of psychiatry sought kinder solutions. One of them was what was called “pious fraud”.

Pious frauds were, as Victoria Shepherd puts in her fascinating A History of Delusions, “little white lies, to trick a person out of a delusion”. In revolutionary Paris, Philippe Pinel, head of the Bicêtre asylum, developed this method. “He would enter part way in the delusion in the hope of bringing his patient back with him to reality,” she wrote.

For example, to help a patient who was suffering from a terror that he was about to be executed, Pinel staged a mock “trial” at which the man was found innocent and told he was free to go.

Later, this method had to be adapted to the delusions of grandeur in which patients imagined themselves to be Napoleon. A Dr Leblond claimed to have cured a captain of the dragoons: “‘It is surely an indignity to treat Emperor Napoleon in this way‚’ he declared to the doctor. ‘Those frightful valets bound me – I intend to have them shot’. To which Leblond calmly replied, ‘Yes, you are indeed emperor Napoleon, but Napoleon on St Helena [island].’ On hearing these words the madman fell silent, then began repeating ‘St Helena, St Helena’. He then asked to be unbound and kept his promise to remain calm until he was freed.”

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