Is mental illness or madness at root an illness of the body, a disease of the mind, or a sickness of the soul? Should those who suffer from it be secluded from society or integrated more fully into it? This Way Madness Lies explores the meaning of mental illness through the successive incarnations of the institution that defined it: the madhouse, designed to segregate its inmates from society; the lunatic asylum, which intended to restore the reason of sufferers by humane treatment; and the mental hospital, which reduced their conditions to diseases of the brain. Moving and sometimes provocative illustrations and photographs, sourced from the Wellcome Collection’s extensive archives and the archives of mental institutions in Europe and the U.S., illuminate and reinforce the compelling narrative, while extensive gallery sections present revealing and thought-provoking artworks by asylum patients and other artists from each era of the institution and beyond.

The literature of the sanatorium probably deserves a list of its own, but Mann’s classic is one of the first and best studies of institutional life. The reader is never entirely sure if the hero, Hans Castorp, is really ill or succumbing to the pleasures of institutionalisation. In an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis at the beginning of the 20th century, the rituals of mealtimes, carefully prescribed walks, rests and consultations leave the patients little to do but watch each other and try not to think about death.

Middlemarch tends to be the one novel taught in medical schools, as if the very name of George Eliot has healing powers. Very little of the novel is set in the town’s hospital, but Dr Lydgate’s project to bring reform to local medical practice represents his doomed optimism about the future of provincial life and English medicine.

Another novel set in a wartime hospital, winning the Booker the year after Regeneration. Four damaged people find themselves and each other in an Italian villa being used as a field hospital at the end of the second world war. The English patient, László Almásy – who is in fact not English – knows that he is dying. As he sinks and surfaces on morphine, he tells the story of his affair with a married Englishwoman in north Africa. There is no prospect of physical healing, for Almásy nor, by the time the atomic bombs have fallen at the end, for the world, but narrative has belated and secondary consolations of its own.

Based on the true and strange overlap of John Clare and Alfred Tennyson in a Victorian lunatic asylum (only Clare was a patient), Foulds’s novel is a model of the beauty that can be achieved with a restricted setting and characters dictated by the historical record.

Bible of generations of clever and misunderstood teenage girls, Plath’s coming-of-age novel seems to affirm a connection between madness and creativity. Esther Greenwood, taking an English degree at an elite women’s college not unlike Plath’s, sees a rapidly approaching choice between marriage and a literary career. Unable to commit to either, her actions become increasingly chaotic until she attempts suicide and is admitted first to a state hospital and then, following the intervention of the novelist who funds her university scholarship, to a private institution where she is kindly treated by female doctors and nurses. This hospital becomes the complement to Esther’s college education, a place where she can learn possible modes of survival for an intelligent woman in 1950s America.

The fictional child of RD Laing and Foucault, a novel in which the asylum is a prison for the punishment of those who have offended social norms without breaking the law. There is nothing redemptive about this hospital, where the authorities represented by “The Combine” use every tactic from lying and manipulation to lobotomy to control patients.

Set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh during the first world war, Pat Barker’s Booker prize winner focuses on the work of Dr William Rivers with victims of shell-shock and trauma. The hospital is a place of healing, where there is some space for attempts to redress the damage of war, but it is in the end a military institution that exacts the final loyalty of its most ambitious employees. In a novel with few female characters, the exploration of different kinds of masculinity in a time of war is deeply engaging.