Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004333592
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
This innovative collection of essays employs historical and sociological approaches to provide important case studies of asylums, psychiatry and mental illness in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Leading scholars in the field working on a variety of geographical, temporal, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts, show how class and gender have historically affected and conditioned the thinking, language, and processes according to which society identified and responded to the mentally ill. Contributors to this volume focus on both class and gender and thus are able to explore their interaction, whereas previous publications addressed class or gender incidentally, partially, or in isolation. By adopting this dual focus as its unifying theme, the volume is able to supply new insights into such interesting topics as patient careers, the relationship between lay and professional knowledge of insanity, the boundaries of professional power, and the creation of psychiatric knowledge. Particularly useful to student readers (and to those new to this academic field) is a substantive and accessible introduction to existing scholarship in the field, which signposts the ways in which this collection challenges, adjusts and extends previous perspectives.
Author: L. Hide
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137321431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
An unprecedented number of people were sent to 'lunatic asylums' in the nineteenth century. But what was life like inside? How was order maintained? And why were so many doctors on the verge of a breakdown themselves? This book provides a glimpse into the lives of patients and staff inside two London asylums at the turn of the twentieth century.
Author: Alison C. Pedley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350275336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society. Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole. Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal, governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.
Author: Joseph Melling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134417098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
The discovery and treatment of insanity remains one of the most debated and discussed issues in social history. Focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century, The Politics of Madness provides a new perspective on this important topic, based on research drawn from both local and national material. Within a social and cultural history of the English political and class order, it presents a fresh appraisal of the significance of the asylum in the decades following the creation of a national asylum system in 1845. Arguing that the new asylums provided a meeting place for different social interests and aspirations, the text asserts that this then marked a transition in provincial power relations from the landed interests to the new coalition of professional, commercial and populist groups, which gained control of the public asylums at the end of the period surveyed.
Author: Brendan Kelly
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
ISBN: 1911024442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 610
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Book Description
Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland is a monumental work by one of Ireland’s leading psychiatrists, encompassing every psychiatric development from the Middle Ages to the present day, and examining the far-reaching social and political effects of Ireland’s troubled relationship with mental illness. From the “Glen of Lunatics”, said to cure the mentally ill, to the overcrowded asylums of later centuries – with more beds for the mentally ill than any other country in the world – Ireland has a complex, unsettled history in the practice of psychiatry. Kelly’s definitive work examines Ireland’s unique relationship with conceptions of mental ill health throughout the centuries, delving into each medical breakthrough and every misuse of authority – both political and domestic – for those deemed to be mentally ill. Through fascinating archival records, Kelly writes a crisp and accessible history, evaluating everything from individual case histories to the seismic effects of the First World War, and exploring the attitudes that guided treatments, spanning Brehon Law to the emerging emphasis on human rights. Hearing Voices is a marvel that affords incredible insight into Ireland’s social and medical history while providing powerful observations on our current treatment of mental ill health in Ireland.
Author: H. Marland
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230511864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Dangerous Motherhood is the first study of the close and complex relationship between mental disorder and childbirth. Exploring the relationship between women, their families and their doctors reveals how explanations for the onset of puerperal insanity were drawn from a broad set of moral, social and environmental frameworks, rather than being bound to ideas that women as a whole were likely to be vulnerable to mental illness. The horror of this devastating disorder which upturned the household, turned gentle mothers into disruptive and dangerous mad women, was magnified by it occurring at a time when it was anticipated that women would be most happy in the fulfillment of their role as mothers.
Author: Bernhard Steffen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031737415
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
Author: Pamela Dale
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134218168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Taking forward the debate on the role and power of institutions for treating and incarcerating the insane, this volume challenges recent scholarship and focuses on a wide range of factors impacting on the care and confinement of the insane since 1850, including such things as the community, Poor Law authorities, local government and the voluntary sector. Questioning the notion that institutions were generally ‘benign’ and responsive to the needs of households, this work also emphasizes the important role of the diversity of interests in shaping institutional facilities. A fresh, stimulating step forward in the history of institutional care, Mental Illness and Learning Disability since 1850 is undoubtedly an important resource for student and scholar alike.
Author: Erika Dyck
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442699345
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Facing Eugenics is a social history of sexual sterilization operations in twentieth-century Canada. Looking at real-life experiences of men and women who, either coercively or voluntarily, participated in the largest legal eugenics program in Canada, it considers the impact of successive legal policies and medical practices on shaping our understanding of contemporary reproductive rights. The book also provides deep insights into the broader implications of medical experimentation, institutionalization, and health care in North America. Erika Dyck uses a range of historical evidence, including medical files, court testimony, and personal records to place mental health and intelligence at the centre of discussions regarding reproductive fitness. Examining acts of resistance alongside heavy-handed decisions to sterilize people considered “unfit,” Facing Eugenics illuminates how reproductive rights fit into a broader discussion of what constitutes civil liberties, modern feminism, and contemporary psychiatric survivor and disability activism.
Author: Will Jackson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Based on over two hundred and fifty psychiatric case files, this book offers a radical new departure from existing historical accounts of what is still commonly thought of as the most picturesque of Britain’s colonies overseas. By tracing the life histories of Kenya’s ‘white insane’, the book allows for a new account of settler society: one that moves attention away from the ‘great white hunters’ and heroic pioneer farmers to all those Europeans who did not manage to emulate the colonial ideal. In doing so, it raises important new questions around deviance, transgression and social control. Sitting at the intersection of a number of fields, the book will appeal to students and teachers of imperial history, colonial medicine, African history and postcolonial theory and will prove a valuable addition to both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
