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Abstract
The history of madness remains one of the most fascinating and contested fields in modern social history. For several decades, scholarship has focussed on analysing the rise of the lunatic asylum and the new profession of psychiatry that was forged within its walls. Individuals diagnosed as insane were largely considered passive victims of social forces beyond their control. However, a new generation of scholarship has sought to de-centre the asylum and reconceptualise the ‘mad’ as historical actors with agency who had troubled lives outside of the formal institution. This article reflects on some major themes in the English-language historiography of madness over the last forty years, at the same time placing some Australian scholarship within that wider context throughout the narrative and in references. It highlights how, paradoxically, histories of the lunatic asylum have provided new insights into extramural care, the persistence of non-medical discourses about insanity, and the subjective experiences of the insane. Rather than ‘out of sight and out of mind’ – an historical topic resting on the periphery of modern social history – this new literature on the history of madness and the asylum illustrates how psychological distress was a mainstream social problem that upended family relations and profoundly disrupted community life.
Keywords:
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Catharine Coleborne and James Dunk for their kind invitation to contribute to this Special Issue and for their feedback on earlier drafts.
Editors’ note
This review article has not been blind peer reviewed but it has been through an editorial peer review process with a single external reader in addition to the editorial team.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
About the author
David Wright is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health Policy at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961). Although arguably his most famous work derived from his doctoral thesis, Foucault had actually written earlier on mental illness and society – Maladie mentale et psychologie: Histoire de la folie – while working as a French-language instructor in Uppsala, Sweden in the mid 1950s. Folie et Déraison was first translated, in abridged form, into English in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, and was reprinted in several editions. There has always been some confusion about what Foucault actually meant by the ‘Classical Age’, which does not translate well into English but corresponds roughly to the period 1650–1800. See Gary Gutting, ‘Foucault and the History of Madness’, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49–73.
2 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor, 1961). Despite its title, Asylums attempted a sociological study of all inmates of so-called ‘closed institutions’, including boarding schools and monasteries. For this sociologist, however, the asylum was the quintessential institution.
3 Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). The success – and notoriety – of the The Myth of Mental Illness would spur Szasz to pen a quasi-historical comparative study of the medicalisation of madness and the Inquisition. See Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
4 Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking, 1962).
5 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960); R.D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family (London: Penguin Books, 1964).
6 David Rosenhan, ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’, Science 179, no. 4070 (1973): 250–8.
7 Robyn Dunlop and Hans Pols, ‘Deinstitutionalisation and Mental Health Activism in Australia: Emerging Voices of Individuals with Lived Experience of Severe Mental Distress, 1975–1985’, History Australia 19, no. 1 (2022).
8 David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
9 Klaus Dörner, Bürger und Irre: zur sozialegeschichte und wissenschaftssoziologie der Psychiatrie (Hamburg: Fischer, 1975), translated into English as Klaus Doener, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry (London: Basil Blackwell, 1981); Robert Castel, L’ordre Psychiatrique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1976), translated into English as The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarceration in France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
10 Scull, Museums of Madness, 252.
11 Mark Finnane, Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland (London: Croom Helm, 1981). Kathleen Jones and Gerald Grob have published multiple volumes over several decades. Two representative books reflecting their scholarship by the 1980s and early 1990s are: Gerald Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Kathleen Jones, Asylums and After: A revised history of the mental health services (London: Athlone, 1993).
12 Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1998), 33.
13 Anne Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A study of the York Retreat, 1796–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
14 Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping 1843–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1985).
15 Richard W. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
16 Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: a social history of insanity in New South Wales, 1880–1940 (Kensington, Aus.: New South Wales University Press, 1988). For a reflection on the dominant intellectual trends in asylum history at the time of the writing of his book, see Stephen Garton, ‘Asylum histories: reconsidering Australia’s lunatic past’, in ‘Madness’ in Australia: histories, heritage and the asylum, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2003), 11–22.
17 For a discussion of women medical superintendents of asylum in the London County Asylum system, see Louise Hide, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
18 For examinations of the uses, and limitations, of asylum case records as expressed by scholarship in the 1990s, see, inter alia: Anne Digby, ‘Quantitative and Qualitative: Perspectives on the Asylum’, in Problems and Methods in the History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter and Andrew Wear (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 153–74; David Wright, ‘The Certification of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England’, History of Psychiatry 9, no. 35 (1998): 267–90; Jonathan Andrews ‘Case Notes, Case Histories, and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine 11, no. 2 (1998): 255–82.
19 For more on asylum museums, public history, and memory, see Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, ed., Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (New York: Routledge, 2011).
20 James Moran, ‘A Tale of Two Bureaucracies: Asylum and Lunacy Law Paperwork’, Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 419–36.
21 Peter Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy: the administration of pauper lunatics in mid-nineteenth century England (London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1999).
22 Steven Cherry, Mental Health Care in Modern England: The Norfolk Lunatic Asylum/St Andrew's Hospital, 1810–1998 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).
23 Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845–1914 (London: Routledge, 2006).
24 Pam Michael, Care and Treatment of the Mentally Ill in North Wales, 1800–2000 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
25 Anna Shepherd, Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).
26 James Moran, Committed to the State Asylum: Insanity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Quebec and Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).
27 For only the most substantial works, see S.E.D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: R.M. Bucke and the Practice of Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Andre-Edgar Montigny, Foisted Upon the Government?: State Responsibility, Family Obligations and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 1997); Geoffrey Reaume, Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870–1940 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2000).
28 Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind.
29 Ellen Dwyer, Homes for the mad: life inside two nineteenth century asylums (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
30 Peter McCandless, Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, N.C.: North Carolina University Press, 1996).
31 Catharine Coleborne, Reading ‘Madness’: Gender and Difference in the colonial asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1888 (Perth: Griffin Press, 2007); Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
32 Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby, Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
33 James Moran, Leslie Topp, Jonathan Andrews, ed., Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2007).
34 Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne, ed., Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840–2010 (New York: Routledge, 2012).
35 Coleborne and MacKinnon, ed., Exhibiting Madness in Museums.
36 Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, ed., ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003).
37 James Moran and David Wright, ed., Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives (Montreal/ Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
38 See, for example, various chapters in Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinharz, ed., Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2009).
39 Leonard Smith, Private Madhouses in England: Commercialized Care for the Insane, 1640–1815 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).
40 William Llewellyn Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Keegan Paul, 1972).
41 Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital: a history of St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin 1746–1989 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989).
42 Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker and Keir Waddington, The History of Bethlehem Hospital (London: Routledge, 1997).
43 Cheryl Warsh, Moments of Unreason: The Practice of Canadian Psychiatry and the Homewood Retreat, 1883–1923 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 1989).
44 Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).
45 Charlotte MacKenzie, Psychiatry for the rich: a history of the private Ticehurst Asylum, 1792–1917 (London: Routledge, 1992).
46 Lawrence Goodheart, Mad Yankees: the Hartford Retreat for the Insane and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
47 Alice Mauger, ‘“Confinement of the Higher Orders”: The Social Role of Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, c.1820–60’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 2 (2012): 286.
48 For an examination of the careers of several of these prominent ‘mad-doctors’, see Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-doctoring Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
49 Philippa Martyr, ‘“Behaving Wildly”: Diagnoses of Lunacy among Indigenous Persons in Western Australia, 1870–1914’, Social History of Medicine 24, no. 2 (2011): 320–1.
50 See Carla Joinson, Vanished in Hiawatha: the story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 15–7.
51 McCandless, Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness, 75–7.
52 Robert Menzies, ‘Race, Reason, and Regulation: British Columbia’s Mass Exile of Chinese “Lunatics” aboard the Empress of Russia, 9 February 1935’, in Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual and the Law, ed. John McLaren, Robert Menzies and Dorothy E. Chunn (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 196–230.
53 McCandless, Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness.
54 Shula Marks, ‘“Every facility that modern science and enlightened humanity have devised”: race and progress in a colonial hospital, Valkenberg Mental Asylum, Cape Colony, 1894–1910’, in Insanity, Institutions and Society: a social history of madness in comparative perspective, ed. Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (London: Routledge, 1999), 268–92.
55 Although this is a complicated story of the English overlords permitting the continuation of welfare institutions to be administered by the Roman Catholic church. Peter Keating, La Science du Mal: l’institution de la psychiatrie au Québec, 1800–1914 (Québec: Boréal, 1993).
56 Dwyer, Homes for the mad. See also Gwendoline M. Ayers, England's First State Hospitals and the Metropolitan Asylums Board, 1867–1930 (London: Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1971).
57 Charles Fox, ‘“Forehead low, aspect idiotic”: intellectual disability in Victorian Asylums, 1870–1887’, in ‘Madness’ in Australia: histories, heritage and the asylum, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2003), 145–56. Asylums for ‘idiot’s and ‘imbeciles’ are beyond the scope of this discussion. For an examination of institutions in the United States, see Steven Noll, Feeble-minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Mark Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Edwardian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
58 Lee-Ann Monk, Attending Madness: at work in the Australian colonial asylum (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
59 Angela McCarthy, Migration, Ethnicity, and Madness: New Zealand, 1860–1910 (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2015).
60 Coleborne, Madness in the Family.
61 See the collection of papers in Peter Bartlett and David Wright, ed., Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–1900 (London: Athlone, 1999). Outside of the English-speaking world, one can see a similar attempt to understand the experiences of the mad within their own ‘life histories’ in the approach adopted by Ann Goldberg in her study of the Eberbach asylum in western Germany. See Ann Goldberg, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness: the Eberbach Asylum and German Society, 1815–49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
62 R.A. Houston, Punishing the Dead: Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
63 John Weaver, Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age (Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2009).
64 Akihito Suzuki, Madness at home: the psychiatrist, the patient and the family in England 1820–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
65 James Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019).
66 James Moran, Madness on Trial: A transatlantic history of English Civil Law and Lunacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).
67 Thierry Nootens, Fous, prodigues et ivrognes: familles et déviance à Montréal au XIXe siècle (Montréal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2007).
68 R.A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
69 Anatole Le Bras, ‘Uses of the Shed as a Confinement Device for the Insane in French Rural Households in the late 19th Century’, in Material Cultures of Psychiatry, ed. Monika Ankele and Benoît Majerus (Germany: Verlag, 2021), 74–95.
70 Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society 14, no. 2 (1985): 175–98.
71 Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World through the Eyes of the Insane (New York: Dutton, 1989).
72 See the four case studies in Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997).
73 Roy Porter, ‘Foreword’, in Voices of Madness, ed. Allan Ingram (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997), vii.
74 Peter McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy: the Victorians and Wrongful Confinement’, Journal of Social History 11, no. 3 (1978): 366–86.
75 Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris, ed., Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls, 1840–1945 (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1994).
76 Geoffrey Reaume, Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870–1940 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2000).
77 For two historiographical surveys using Porter’s influential 1985 paper as a starting point, see Flurin Condrau, ‘The Patient’s View Meets the Clinical Gaze’, Social History of Medicine 20, no. 3 (2007): 525–40; and Alexandra Bacopolos-Viau, ‘Tales from the Asylum: Patient Narratives and the (De)Construction of Psychiatry’, special issue of Medical History 60, no. 1 (2016): 1–18.
78 Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: the Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London, with the complete text of John Monro’s 1766 Casebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 91.
79 Sally Swartz, ‘Asylum Case Records: Fact and Fiction’, Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 289–301.
80 See introduction to Geoffrey Reaume, Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870–1940 (Down Mills: Oxford University Press, 2000).
81 In Canada, those interested in ‘Mad history’ workshopped an edited collection Mad Matters in 2008. Brenda LeFrançois, Robert Menzies and Geoffrey Reaume, ed., Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Mad Studies (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013).
82 Catherine Kudlick, ‘Disability History: Why We Need Another “Other”’, The American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 763–93.
83 Catharine Coleborne, Why Talk about Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).
84 See for example, a recent conference along these themes, held in Holland, entitled: ‘History from Below Revisited’ (19 February 2021).
85 David Wright and Nathan Flis, ‘A Grave Injustice: The Mental Hospital and Shifting Sites of Memory’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (New York: Routledge, 2011), 101–115.