This innovative collection of essays employs historical and sociological approaches to provide important case studies of asylums, psychiatry and mental illness in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Leading scholars in the field working on a variety of geographical, temporal, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts, show how class and gender have historically affected and conditioned the thinking, language, and processes according to which society identified and responded to the mentally ill. Contributors to this volume focus on both class and gender and thus are able to explore their interaction, whereas previous publications addressed class or gender incidentally, partially, or in isolation. By adopting this dual focus as its unifying theme, the volume is able to supply new insights into such interesting topics as patient careers, the relationship between lay and professional knowledge of insanity, the boundaries of professional power, and the creation of psychiatric knowledge. Particularly useful to student readers (and to those new to this academic field) is a substantive and accessible introduction to existing scholarship in the field, which signposts the ways in which this collection challenges, adjusts and extends previous perspectives.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1 Jonathan ANDREWS and Anne DIGBY: Introduction: Gender and Class in the Historiography of British and Irish Psychiatry
2 Robert Allan HOUSTON: Class, Gender and Madness in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
3 Oonagh WALSH: Gender and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
4 Pamela MICHAEL: Class, Gender and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Wales
5 Marjorie LEVINE-CLARK: 'Embarrassed Circumstances': Gender, Poverty, and Insanity in the West Riding of England in the Early-Victorian Years
6 David WRIGHT: Delusions of Gender?: Lay Identification and Clinical Diagnosis of Insanity in Victorian England
7 Joseph MELLING: Sex and Sensibility in Cultural History: The English Governess and the Lunatic Asylum, 1845-1914
8 Anne SHEPHERD: The Female Patient Experience in Two Late-Nineteenth-Century Surrey Asylums
9 Lorraine WALSH: A Class Apart? Admissions to the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum 1890-1910
10 Mark JACKSON: 'A Menace to the Good of Society': Class, Fertility, and the Feeble-Minded in Edwardian England
11 Joan BUSFIELD: Class and Gender in Twentieth-Century British Psychiatry: Shell-Shock and Psychopathic Disorder
Index of People and Places
Index of Subjects
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1 Jonathan ANDREWS and Anne DIGBY: Introduction: Gender and Class in the Historiography of British and Irish Psychiatry
2 Robert Allan HOUSTON: Class, Gender and Madness in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
3 Oonagh WALSH: Gender and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
4 Pamela MICHAEL: Class, Gender and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Wales
5 Marjorie LEVINE-CLARK: 'Embarrassed Circumstances': Gender, Poverty, and Insanity in the West Riding of England in the Early-Victorian Years
6 David WRIGHT: Delusions of Gender?: Lay Identification and Clinical Diagnosis of Insanity in Victorian England
7 Joseph MELLING: Sex and Sensibility in Cultural History: The English Governess and the Lunatic Asylum, 1845-1914
8 Anne SHEPHERD: The Female Patient Experience in Two Late-Nineteenth-Century Surrey Asylums
9 Lorraine WALSH: A Class Apart? Admissions to the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum 1890-1910
10 Mark JACKSON: 'A Menace to the Good of Society': Class, Fertility, and the Feeble-Minded in Edwardian England
11 Joan BUSFIELD: Class and Gender in Twentieth-Century British Psychiatry: Shell-Shock and Psychopathic Disorder
Index of People and Places
Index of Subjects