HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Psychosurgery, Hydrotherapy, Malaria
Madness, Psychiatry & the Lunatic Asylum 1760-1950
(Guest Lecturer)
• Reading:
o Textbook: Jonathan Andrews : "The Rise of the Asylum in Britain"
• Guest Lecture - David Wright
• History of Madness
• Language is important…
1. Lunacy Reform & Moral Treatments
• 18th century
• Rise for profit homes or private 'madhouses'
• Rapid increase in wealth
• Trade in lunacy - profiting off people
• Not a positive thing
• Suspicions of ill-treatment
• Asylum's
• Backlash to private madhouses:
• Restraints
• Abuse, neglect
• Wrongful containment
• People being sent here weren't actually insane
• Need for state institutions for the mentally ill
• Abolition of mechanical restraint
• Whips, chains
• Wanted to outlaw this
• Philippe Pinel
• Super-intendent of private institutions
• Was an 'alienist'
• French word for lunatics
• Was a psychiatrist
• Pinel unchains the insane
• Freeing people
• Political act - act of the enlightenment
• Moral treatment / setting
• Quaker retreat
• Religious
• Retreats/asylums
• Humane treatment
• Small home-like institutions
• Rural locations with farmland
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
2
• Re-integrated back into family/home life
• No constraint
2. The Rise of the Lunatic Asylum
• Quaker retreat wasn’t realized
• Restraint
• All patients could be cured
• Need to transform the lunatic into a rational being through daily activities (gender
bias)
• What about medicine?
• Institutional treatment
• Madness as a mental disease
• Medicalization of moral treatment
• Mental illness
• Madness is not just something spiritual, it is a disease - bodily condition that
impacts the brain
• Needs to be treated by those who are medically trained
• Hospital like environment to treat this medical disease
• Separate the lunatic from the disordered environment
• Something is triggering their mental disease in their environment
• Separation is embraced by medical profession
• Construction of public state asylums
• National legislation obliging local authorities to construct asylums for their
poor insane
• State run, state funded
• Others are religiously run or private
• Construction of public state asylums
• No national legislation / federal states
• Decentralized or federal model
• States construct these institutions…
• Transnational phenomenon
• Construction of public state asylums
• Colonial asylums
• Imposed by colonial powers
• Location of the asylums
• Outside of major provincial capitals (on or near railway, farmland)
• Made on top of hills - Saint John's
• Provides the best 'air' for recovery
• Isolation
• Land was cheaper
• Costs of asylums:
• Expensive
• Exploded
• Controversial, political issues…
• Money coming from tax payers
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
