The Certification of Insanity
The Certification of Insanity

Author: Filippo Maria Sposini

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 3031427424

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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.

Newspaper Writings
Newspaper Writings

Author: John Stuart Mill

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1986-12-15

Total Pages: 1641

ISBN-13: 1442638702

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For just over fifty years John Stuart Mill contributed articles and letters to the newspapers, setting before the public a radical position on contemporary events. From 1822 to 1873, in newspapers as widely read as The Times and the Morning Chronicle, and as narrowly circulated as the True Sun and the New Times, he praised his friends and damned his opponents, while commenting on a while range of issues at home and abroad, from banking to Ireland, from wife-beating to land nationalization. His main series of newspaper writings concerned France (especially during the first four years of the Revolution of 1830) and Ireland (especially during December 1846 and January 1847, when various proposals for relief of the starving cottiers were being debated). Mill felt himself peculiarly fitted to explain French affairs and Irish solutions to the non-comprehending and wrong-headed English. But his pen was wielded wherever he say stupidity and narrowness, and he found them in astonishingly varied areas. He tried to explain to his obdurate countrymen the first principles of law reform, political economy, relations between the sexes, democracy, international law, and much more. Virtually none of these texts have been reprinted before this volume. The Introduction by Ann Robson sets the items in their historical and personal perspective, and draws out the implications for Mill's life and thought. The Textual Introduction by John Robson gives an account of the sources of the texts, and lays out principles and methods followed in the editing. The Mill that emerges from these pages is a fighting journalist, uninhibited, forthright, and often brilliantly satirical, testing his theoretical opinions in the real world, gradually maturing and developing a practical philosophy whose influence has been felt well into our own time.