Author : S. E. D. Shortt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 41,60 MB
Release : 2011-02-17
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780521172820
This 1986 book explores the theory and practice of late nineteenth-century psychiatry. Psychiatric theory is discussed less as an objective body of biomedical knowledge than as a product of the social turmoil that characterized the final decades of the nineteenth century.
Author : Sarah Wise
Publisher : Random House
Page : 531 pages
File Size : 25,60 MB
Release : 2012-10-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1409027953
This highly original book brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy and the dark motives behind them in the Victorian period. Gaslight tales of rooftop escapes, men and women snatched in broad daylight, patients shut in coffins, a fanatical cult known as the Abode of Love... The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums. With the rise of the ‘mad-doctor’ profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend. Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes – their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence – and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the ‘inconvenient person.' ‘A fine social history of the people who contested their confinement to madhouses in the 19th century, Wise offers striking arguments, suggesting that the public and juries were more intent on liberty than doctors and families’ Sunday Telegraph
Author : Stef Eastoe
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 28,66 MB
Release : 2020-02-19
Category : History
ISBN : 3030273350
This book explores the understudied history of the so-called ‘incurables’ in the Victorian period, the people identified as idiots, imbeciles and the weak-minded, as opposed to those thought to have curable conditions. It focuses on Caterham, England’s first state imbecile asylum, and analyses its founding, purpose, character, and most importantly, its residents, innovatively recreating the biographies of these people. Created to relieve pressure on London’s overcrowded workhouses, Caterham opened in September 1870. It was originally intended as a long-stay institution for the chronic and incurable insane paupers of the metropolis, more commonly referred to as idiots and imbeciles. This purpose instantly differentiates Caterham from the more familiar, and more researched, lunatic asylums, which were predicated on the notion of cure and restoration of the senses. Indeed Caterham, built following the welfare and sanitary reforms of the late 1860s, was an important feature of the Victorian institutional landscape, and it represented a shift in social, medical and political responsibility towards the care and management of idiot and imbecile paupers.
Author : Andrew Scull
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 10,14 MB
Release : 1981-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0812211197
The Victorian Age saw the transformation of the madhouse into the asylum into the mental hospital; of the mad-doctor into the alienist into the psychiatrist; and of the madman (and madwoman) into the mental patient. In Andrew Scull's edited collection Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, contributors' essays offer a historical analysis of the issues that continue to plague the psychiatric profession today. Topics covered include the debate over the effectiveness of institutional or community treatment, the boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility, the implementation of commitment laws, and the differences in defining and treating mental illness based on the gender of the patient.
Author : Mark Stevens
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 10,89 MB
Release : 2013-06-19
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1783462361
“A fascinating insight into the country’s most famous asylum for criminals” which reveals Victorian England’s care and management of the mentally ill (Your Family Tree). On 27 May 1863, three coaches pulled up at the gates of a new asylum, built amongst the tall, dense pines of Windsor Forest. Broadmoor’s first patients had arrived. In Broadmoor Revealed, Mark Stevens writes about what life was like for the criminally insane, over one hundred years ago. From fresh research into the Broadmoor archives, Mark has uncovered the lost lives of patients whose mental illnesses led them to become involved in crime. Discover the five women who went on to become mothers in Broadmoor, giving birth to new life when three of them had previously taken it. Find out how several Victorian immigrants ended their hopeful journeys to England in madness and disaster. And follow the numerous escapes, actual and attempted, as the first doctors tried to assert control over the residents. As well as bringing the lives of forgotten patients to light, this thrilling book reveals new perspectives on some of the hospital’s most famous Victorian residents: Edward Oxford, the bar boy who shot at Queen Victoria. Richard Dadd, the brilliant artist and murderer of his own father. William Chester Minor, veteran of the American Civil War who went on to play a key part in the first Oxford English Dictionary. Christiana Edmunds, The Chocolate Cream Poisoner and frustrated lover from Brighton. “Detailed and thoughtful.” —Times Literary Supplement “It challenges preconceptions about mental illness and public reaction to shocking crimes.” —Bracknell Forest Standard
Author : Katherine Fennelly
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 39,52 MB
Release : 2019-07-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1526126516
An archaeology of lunacy is a materially focused exploration of the first wave of public asylum building in Britain and Ireland, which took place during the late-Georgian and early Victorian period. Examining architecture and material culture, the book proposes that the familiar asylum archetype, usually attributed to the Victorians, was in fact developed much earlier. It looks at the planning and construction of the first public asylums and assesses the extent to which popular ideas about reformed management practices for the insane were applied at ground level. Crucially, it moves beyond doctors and reformers, repopulating the asylum with the myriad characters that made up its everyday existence: keepers, clerks and patients. Contributing to archaeological scholarship on institutions of confinement, the book is aimed at academics, students and general readers interested in the material environment of the historic lunatic asylum.
Author : Sarah Ann Pinto
Publisher : Springer
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 37,45 MB
Release : 2018-08-28
Category : History
ISBN : 3319942441
This book traces the historical roots of the problems in India’s mental health care system. It accounts for indigenous experiences of the lunatic asylum in the Bombay Presidency (1793-1921). The book argues that the colonial lunatic asylum failed to assimilate into Indian society and therefore remained a failed colonial-medical enterprise. It begins by assessing the implications of lunatic asylums on indigenous knowledge and healing traditions. It then examines the lunatic asylum as a ‘middle-ground’, and the European superintendents’ ‘common-sense’ treatment of Indian insanity. Furthermore, it analyses the soundscapes of Bombay’s asylums, and the extent to which public perceptions influenced their use. Lunatic asylums left a legacy of historical trauma for the indigenous community because of their coercive and custodial character. This book aims to disrupt that legacy of trauma and to enable new narratives in mental health treatment in India.
Author : Valerie Pedlar
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 15,92 MB
Release : 2006-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0853238391
Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The 'Most Dreadful Visitation.' This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins's Basil, and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings--and fears--of mental degeneracy.An Open Access edition of this work is available on the OAPEN Library.
Author : William F. Bynum
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 40,70 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Psychiatric hospitals
ISBN : 9780415323840
Author : Claire Hilton
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 41,35 MB
Release : 2020-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 3030548716
This open access book explores the history of asylums and their civilian patients during the First World War, focusing on the effects of wartime austerity and deprivation on the provision of care. While a substantial body of literature on ‘shell shock’ exists, this study uncovers the mental wellbeing of civilians during the war. It provides the first comprehensive account of wartime asylums in London, challenging the commonly held view that changes in psychiatric care for civilians post-war were linked mainly to soldiers’ experiences and treatment. Drawing extensively on archival and published sources, this book examines the impact of medical, scientific, political, cultural and social change on civilian asylums. It compares four asylums in London, each distinct in terms of their priorities and the diversity of their patients. Revealing the histories of the 100,000 civilian patients who were institutionalised during the First World War, this book offers new insights into decision-making and prioritisation of healthcare in times of austerity, and the myriad factors which inform this.
