The Trade in Lunacy

The Trade in Lunacy PDF

Author: William Ll. Parry-Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 113503141X

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First published in 2006. A private madhouse can be defined as a privately owned establishment for the reception and care of insane persons, conducted as a business proposition for the personal profit of the proprietor or proprietors. The history of such establishments in England and Wales can be traced for a period of over three and a half centuries, from the early seventeenth century up to the present day. This volume is a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Inconvenient People

Inconvenient People PDF

Author: Sarah Wise

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1619023229

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The phenomenon of false allegations of mental illness is as old as our first interactions as human beings. Every one of us has described some other person as crazy or insane, and most all of us have had periods, moments at least, of madness. But it took the confluence of the law and medical science, mad–doctors, alienists, priests and barristers, to raise the matter to a level of "science," capable of being used by conniving relatives, "designing families" and scheming neighbors to destroy people who found themselves in the way, people whose removal could provide their survivors with money or property or other less frivolous benefits. Girl Interrupted in only a recent example. And reversing this sort of diagnosis and incarceration became increasingly more difficult, as even the most temperate attempt to leave these "homes" or "hospitals" was deemed "crazy." Kept in a madhouse, one became a little mad, as Jack Nicholson and Ken Kesey explain in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. In this sadly terrifying, emotionally moving, and occasionally hilarious book, twelve cases of contested lunacy are offered as examples of the shifting arguments regarding what constituted sanity and insanity. They offer unique insight into the fears of sexuality, inherited madness, greed and fraud, until public feeling shifted and turned against the rising alienists who would challenge liberty and freedom of people who were perhaps simply "difficult," but were turned into victims of this unscrupulous trade. This fascinating book is filled with stories almost impossible to believe but wildly engaging, a book one will not soon forget.

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade PDF

Author: Jonathan Andrews

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-01-16

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0520926080

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This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.

Masters of Bedlam

Masters of Bedlam PDF

Author: Andrew Scull

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1400864402

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Through an examination of the fascinating lives and careers of a series of nineteenth-century "mad-doctors," Masters of Bedlam provides a unique perspective on the creation of the modern profession of psychiatry, taking us from the secret and shady practices of the trade in lunacy, through the utopian expectations that were aroused by the lunacy reform movement, to the dismal realities of the barracks-asylums--those Victorian museums of madness within which most nineteenth-century alienists found themselves compelled to practice. Across a century that spans the period from an unreformed Bedlam to the construction of a post-Darwinian bio-psychiatry centered on the new Maudsley Hospital, from a therapeutics of bleeding, purging, and close confinement through the era of moral treatment and nonrestraint to a fin-de-siécle degenerationism and despair, men claiming expertise in the treatment of mental disorder sought to construct a collective identity as trustworthy and scientifically qualified professionals. This fascinating series of biographies answers the question: How successful were they in creating such a new identity?. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, the authors vividly re-create the often colorful and always eventful lives of these seven "masters of bedlam." Sensitive to the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of each man's personal biography, the authors replace hagiographical ac-counts of the great men who founded modern psychiatry with fully rounded portraits of their struggles and successes, their achievements and limitations. In the process Masters of Bedlam provides an extremely subtle and nuanced portrait of the efforts of successive generations of alienists to carve out a popular and scientific respect for their specialty, and reminds us repeatedly of the complexities of nineteenth-century developments in the field of psychiatry. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Undertaker of the Mind

Undertaker of the Mind PDF

Author: Jonathan Andrews

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-11-27

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780520927858

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As visiting physician to Bethlem Hospital, the archetypal "Bedlam" and Britain's first and (for hundreds of years) only public institution for the insane, Dr. John Monro (1715–1791) was a celebrity in his own day. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull call him a "connoisseur of insanity, this high priest of the trade in lunacy." Although the basics of his life and career are well known, this study is the first to explore in depth Monro's colorful and contentious milieu. Mad-doctoring grew into a recognized, if not entirely respectable, profession during the eighteenth century, and besides being affiliated with public hospitals, Monro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous. Monro's close social connections with members of the aristocracy and gentry, as well as with medical professionals, politicians, and divines, guaranteed him a significant place in the social, political, cultural, and intellectual worlds of his time. Andrews and Scull draw on an astonishing array of visual materials and verbal sources that include the diaries, family papers, and correspondence of some of England's wealthiest and best-connected citizens. The book is also distinctive in the coverage it affords to individual case histories of Monro's patients, including such prominent contemporary figures as the Earls Ferrers and Orford, the religious "enthusiast" Alexander Cruden, and the "mad" King George III, as well as his crazy would-be assassin, Margaret Nicholson. What the authors make clear is that Monro, a serious physician neither reactionary nor enlightened in his methods, was the outright epitome of the mad-trade as it existed then, esteemed in some quarters and ridiculed in others. The fifty illustrations, expertly annotated and integrated with the text, will be a revelation to many readers.

Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815

Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815 PDF

Author: Leonard Smith

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2020-06-08

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9783030416393

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This book examines the origins and early development of private mental health-care in England, showing that the current spectacle of commercially-based participation in key elements of service provision is no new phenomenon. In 1815, about seventy per cent of people institutionalised because of insanity were being kept in private ‘madhouses’. The opening four chapters detail the emergence of these madhouses and demonstrate their increasing presence in London and across the country during the long eighteenth century. Subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects in greater depth - the insane patients themselves, their characteristics, and the circumstances surrounding admissions; the madhouse proprietors, their business activities, personal attributes and professional qualifications or lack of them; changing treatment practices and the principles that informed them. Finally, the book explores conditions within the madhouses, which ranged from the relatively enlightened to the seriously defective, and reveals the experiences, concerns and protests of their many critics.

The Trade in Lunacy

The Trade in Lunacy PDF

Author: William Ll. Parry-Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1135031428

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First published in 2006. A private madhouse can be defined as a privately owned establishment for the reception and care of insane persons, conducted as a business proposition for the personal profit of the proprietor or proprietors. The history of such establishments in England and Wales can be traced for a period of over three and a half centuries, from the early seventeenth century up to the present day. This volume is a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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