Private Madhouses In England 1640 1815

This book examines the origins and early development of private mental health-care in England, showing that the current spectacle of commercially-based participation in key elements of service provision is no new phenomenon. In 1815, about seventy per cent of people institutionalised because of insanity were being kept in private ‘madhouses’. The opening four chapters detail the emergence of these madhouses and demonstrate their increasing presence in London and across the country during the long eighteenth century. Subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects in greater depth - the insane patients themselves, their characteristics, and the circumstances surrounding admissions; the madhouse proprietors, their business activities, personal attributes and professional qualifications or lack of them; changing treatment practices and the principles that informed them. Finally, the book explores conditions within the madhouses, which ranged from the relatively enlightened to the seriously defective, and reveals the experiences, concerns and protests of their many critics.

First published in 2006. A private madhouse can be defined as a privately owned establishment for the reception and care of insane persons, conducted as a business proposition for the personal profit of the proprietor or proprietors. The history of such establishments in England and Wales can be traced for a period of over three and a half centuries, from the early seventeenth century up to the present day. This volume is a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This book explores the ways which people navigated the emotions provoked by the mad in Britain across the long eighteenth century. Building upon recent advances in the historical study of emotions, it plots the evolution of attitudes towards insanity, and considers how shifting emotional norms influenced the development of a ‘humanitarian’ temperament, which drove the earliest movements for psychiatric reform in England and Scotland. Reacting to a ‘culture of sensibility’, which encouraged tears at the sight of tender suffering, early asylum reformers chose instead to express their humanity through unflinching resolve, charging into madhouses to contemplate scenes of misery usually hidden from public view, and confronting the authorities that enabled neglect to flourish. This intervention required careful emotional management, which is documented comprehensively here for the first time. Drawing upon a wide array of medical and literary sources, this book provides invaluable insights into pre-modern attitudes towards insanity.

This book represents the first systematic study of the certification of lunacy in the British Empire. Considering a variety of legal, archival, and published sources, it traces the origins and dissemination of a peculiar method for determining mental unsoundness defined as the ‘Victorian system’. Shaped by the dynamics surrounding the clandestine committal of wealthy Londoners in private madhouses, this system featured three distinctive tenets: standardized forms, independent medical examinations, and written facts of insanity. Despite their complexity, Victorian certificates achieved a remarkable success. Not only did they survive in the UK for more than a century, but they also served as a model for the development of mental health laws around the world. By the start of the Second World War, more than seventy colonial and non-colonial jurisdictions adopted the Victorian formula for making lunacy official with some countries still relying on it to this very day. Using case studies from Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific, this book charts the temporal and geographical trajectory of an imperial technology used to determine a person’s destiny. Shifting the focus from metropolitan policies to colonial dynamics, and from macro developments to micro histories, it explores the perspectives of families, doctors, and public officials as they began to deal with the delicate business of certification. This book will be of interest to scholars working on mental health policy, the history of medicine, disability studies, and the British Empire.

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences offers a uniquely comprehensive and global overview of the evolution of ideas, concepts and policies within the human sciences. Drawn from histories of the social and psychological sciences, anthropology, the history and philosophy of science, and the history of ideas, this collection analyses the health and welfare of populations, evidence of the changing nature of our local communities, cities, societies or global movements, and studies the way our humanness or ‘human nature’ undergoes shifts because of broader technological shifts or patterns of living. This Handbook serves as an authoritative reference to a vast source of representative scholarly work in interdisciplinary fields, a means of understanding patterns of social change and the conduct of institutions, as well as the histories of these ‘ways of knowing’ probe the contexts, circumstances and conditions which underpin continuity and change in the way we count, analyse and understand ourselves in our different social worlds. It reflects a critical scholarly interest in both traditional and emerging concerns on the relations between the biological and social sciences, and between these and changes and continuities in societies and conducts, as 21st century research moves into new intellectual and geographic territories, more diverse fields and global problematics. ​

The first historical study to offer an in-depth exploration of the complex relationship between the prison and mental breakdown.

This book presents new perspectives on the multiplicity of voices in the histories of mental ill-health. In the thirty years since Roy Porter called on historians to lower their gaze so that they might better understand patient-doctor roles in the past, historians have sought to place the voices of previously silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses. Today, the development of service-user groups and patient consultations have become an important feature of the debates and planning related to current approaches to prevention, care and treatment. This edited collection of interdisciplinary chapters offers new and innovative perspectives on mental health and illness in the past and covers a breadth of opinions, views, and interpretations from patients, practitioners, policy makers, family members and wider communities. Its chronology runs from the early modern period to the twenty-first century and includes international and transnational analyses from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of sources and methodologies including oral histories, material culture, and the built environment. Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century—an era that has been called the ‘Age of Science’—the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being.