Christina Ramos’s meticulously researched Bedlam in the New World is full of surprises to historians of psychiatry. She starts off recounting an 1877 speech by the director of the Hospital de San Hipólito, the oldest mental hospital in the Americas. Founded by a penitent conquistador in 1567, the hospital had experienced periods of decline and decay and periods of reform and renovation. The ups and downs of asylums are a familiar theme. The director, Sebastián Labastida, made the overblown argument that the 300-year-old asylum should be a source of pride for Mexico and for the medical establishment, rather than a symbol of darkness and backwardness. Labastida exaggerated the positives of the institution, but he correctly noted that there was indeed a long history of mental health care that had been erased from historical memory.