Abstract
On 5 April 1877, The Times reported an episode from the Dorset Quarter Sessions. Addressing the problem of overcrowding in the local asylum, a former magistrate was reported to have commented that ‘if the [sic] lunacy continued to increase as at present the insane would be in the majority, and, freeing themselves, would put the sane in asylums’.1 He was expressing the underlying sense of alarm concerning the rise in lunacy that had become a national preoccupation. The situation did not improve. By 1909, while the country’s population had approximately doubled in 50 years, the number of people who were institutionalised for being of unsound mind had quadrupled over the same period.2 Many feared that madness was becoming endemic within a society that was spinning out of control and, even worse, that they themselves might be detained in an asylum against their will.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kathleen Jones, Asylums and After: A Revised History of the Mental Health Services: From the Early 18th Century to the 1900s (London: Athlone Press, 1993), 115.
Joan Busfield, Managing Madness: Changing Ideas and Practice (London: Unwin Hyman, 1986), 283.
Linda Massie, ‘The Role of Women in Mental Health Care in 19th Century England’, International History of Nursing Journal, 1 (1995), 39–51, p. 41.
Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, Britain 1870–1914 (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 43–4, 129–34.
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London 17 vols (London: Macmillan, 1902–3).
Alan Kidd, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 48–52.
Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods. Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1992), 150.
Robert Jones, ‘Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland: Presidential Address on The Evolution of Insanity, delivered July 26th 1906’, Journal of Mental Science (hereafter JMS), 52 (1906), 629–61, p. 645.
Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 128.
Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870), 75.
Andrew Wynter, The Borderlands of Insanity and other Allied Papers (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875), 71–2.
Tracey Loughran, ‘Hysteria and Neurasthenia in pre-1914 British Medical Discourse and in Histories of Shell-Shock’, History of Psychiatry, 19.1 (2008), 25–46, p. 37.
Lawrence J. Ray, ‘Models of Madness in Victorian Asylum Practice’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 22 (1981), 229–64, p. 256.
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1999), Table 3, n.p.
Peter Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 96
Robert Jones, ‘The London County Council Asylum at Claybury, and a Sketch of its first Working Year’, JMS, 43 (1897), 47–58, p. 47.
N.A., ‘Private Patients in London County Asylums’, JMS, 47 (1901), 101–3, pp. 101–2.
LCC Tenth Annual Report (1899), LMA 26.21, 10.
LCC Eleventh Annual Report (1900), LMA 26.21, 60–2.
Robert Jones, ‘The Urgent Necessity of Helping Mental Convalescents’, JMS, 55 (1909), 410–18, pp. 413–4.
It is not possible to make a direct comparison of clerks. LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 188–92
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 192–4
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 178
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 179
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, Table X, 182.
Henry Maudsley, ‘Suicide in Simple Melancholy,’ The Medical Magazine, 1.1 (1892), 45–56, p. 47.
NA, ‘The Strife with Alcohol’, JMS, 46 (1900), 526–8, p. 527.
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 89.
Sixty-first Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy (1907), 148–9; LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 180–83.
R. S. Stewart, ‘The Increase of General Paralysis in England and Wales: Its Causation and Significance’, JMS, 42 (1896), 760–77, p. 777.
LCC Sixth Annual Report (1895), LMA 26.21, 53
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 187
Gayle Davis, ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’: Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880–1930 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), chapter 6.
F. W. Mott. ‘Relation of Syphilis to Insanity’, JMS, 45 (1899), 683–99, p. 690.
Harvey Baird, ‘Statistical Observations on General Paralysis’, JMS, 51 (1905), 581–5, p. 583.
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 256.
Pathologist’s Report, ‘Medical Superintendents’ Reports’, JMS, 57 (1911) 174–83, p. 178.
Elaine and English Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation,’ Victorian Studies, 14 (1970), 83–9, p. 87.
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 180–3
Copyright information
© 2014 Louise Hide
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hide, L. (2014). The Making of the Patient Population. In: Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321435_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321435_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45802-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32143-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)