This comprehensive collection provides a fascinating summary of the debates on the growth of institutional care during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Revising and revisiting Foucault, it looks at the significance of ethnicity, race and gender as well as the impact of political and cultural factors, throughout Britain and in a colonial context. It questions historically what it means to be mad and how, if at all, to care.
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.
This book explores local medical, lay and legal negotiations with the asylum system in nineteenth-century Ireland. It deepens our understanding of attitudes towards the mentally ill and institutional provision for the care and containment of people diagnosed as insane. Uniquely, it expands the analytical focus beyond asylums incorporating the impact that the Irish poor law, petty session courts and medical dispensaries had on the provision of services. It provides insights into life in asylums for patients and staff. The study uses Carlow asylum district – comprised of counties Wexford, Kildare, Kilkenny and Carlow in the southeast of Ireland – to explore the ‘place of the asylum’ in the period. This book will be useful for scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland, the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland, Irish studies and gender studies.
This study provides the first exclusive analysis of disabled First World War veterans who returned to Ireland. With a case study of mental illness, it foregrounds how the treatment and experiences of disabled communities in past societies is shaped by the existing socio-economic, cultural and political context.
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.
In this fundamentally important work, Professor Brendan Kelly explores the background to Irish psychiatry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, charting its progress and development. Using detailed case studies from the original records, the author examines some of the more unusual treatments explored and the history behind them. What emerges is a collection of piercing, untold stories of crime and illness, drama and tragedy. They are filled with a sense of the powerlessness of those detained and the dedicated – and sometimes misguided – enthusiasm of those trying to help. This book sheds important light on the foundations for the treatment of mental illness in Ireland.
More people die by suicide each year than by homicide, wars, and terrorist attacks combined. Witnesses and survivors are left perplexed and troubled. Doctors, clinical psychologists, and social workers try to deal with it through their professional routines; sociologists and psychiatrists attempt to provide theoretical explanations of it. In a study of nearly 7000 suicides from 1900 to 1950 in New Zealand and Queensland, Australia, John Weaver documents the challenges that ordinary people experienced during turbulent times and, using witnesses' testimony, death bed statements, and suicide notes, reconstructs individuals' thoughts as they decide whether to endure their suffering. Bridging social and medical history, Weaver presents an intellectual and political history of suicide studies, a revealing construction and deconstruction of suicide rates, a discussion of gender, life stages, and socio-economic circumstances in relation to suicide patterns, reflections on reasoning processes and intent, and society's reactions to suicide, including medical intervention. A Sadly Troubled History marshals thousands of suicide inquests, replete with observations on the anxieties of unemployment, the heartbreak of romantic disappointment, the pain of domestic turmoil, and the torments of mental illness, to demonstrate that history - although, like biochemistry, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, reliant on remarkable yet imperfect information - can contribute to a better understanding of the suicidal act and its motives.
Law and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes. What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them. The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime. This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.
