Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Author: R. A. Houston
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2000-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191542989

How did people view mental health problems in the eighteenth century, and what do the attitudes of ordinary people towards those afflicted tell us about the values of society at that time? Professor Houston draws upon a wide range of contemporary sources, notably asylum documents, and civil and criminal court records, to present unique insights into the issues around madness, including the written and spoken words of sufferers themselves, and the vocabulary associated with insanity. The links between madness and a range of other issues are explored including madness, gender, social status, religion and witchcraft, in addition to the attributed causes of derangement such as heredity and alcohol abuse. This is a detailed yet profoundly humane and compassionate study of the everyday experiences of those suffering mental impairments ranging from idiocy to lunacy, and an exploration into the meaning of this for society in the eighteenth century.

Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing

Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing
Author: A. Ingram
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2004-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230510892

Cultural Constructions of Madness in the Eighteenth Century deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond. Chapters cover the representation, distortion, sentimentalization and elevation of insanity, and such associated issues as gender, personal identity, and performance, in some of the best, as well as some of the least, known writers of the period. A selection of visual material, including works by Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, is also discussed. While primarily adopting a literary focus, the work is informed throughout by an alertness to significant issues of medical and psychiatric history.

Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815

Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815
Author: Leonard Smith
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2020-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030416402

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.

Mad Tuscans and Their Families

Mad Tuscans and Their Families
Author: Elizabeth W. Mellyn
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812246128

Based on three hundred civil and criminal cases over four centuries, Elizabeth W. Mellyn reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. In some of these cases, solutions were protective and palliative; in others, they were predatory or abusive. The goals of families were sometimes at odds with those of the courts, but for the most part families and judges worked together to order households and communities in ways that served public and private interests. For most of the period Mellyn examines, Tuscan communities had no institutions devoted solely to the treatment and protection of the mentally disturbed; responsibility for their long-term care fell to the family. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tuscans, like other Europeans, had come to explain madness in medical terms and the mentally disordered were beginning to move from households to hospitals. In Mad Tuscans and Their Families, Mellyn argues against the commonly held belief that these changes chart the rise of mechanisms of social control by emerging absolutist states. Rather, the story of mental illness is one of false starts, expedients, compromise, and consensus created by a wide range of historical actors.

Citizenship after Orientalism

Citizenship after Orientalism
Author: Engin Isin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137479507

This edited volume presents a critique of citizenship as exclusively and even originally a European or 'Western' institution. It explores the ways in which we may begin to think differently about citizenship as political subjectivity.

Madness at Home

Madness at Home
Author: Akihito Suzuki
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2006-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520932218

The history of psychiatric institutions and the psychiatric profession is by now familiar: asylums multiplied in nineteenth-century England and psychiatry established itself as a medical specialty around the same time. We are, however, largely ignorant about madness at home in this key period: what were the family’s attitudes toward its insane member, what were patient’s lives like when they remained at home? Until now, most accounts have suggested that the family and community gradually abdicated responsibility for taking care of mentally ill members to the doctors who ran the asylums. However, this provocatively argued study, painting a fascinating picture of how families viewed and managed madness, suggests that the family actually played a critical role in caring for the insane and in the development of psychiatry itself. Akihito Suzuki’s richly detailed social history includes several fascinating case histories, looks closely at little studied source material including press reports of formal legal declarations of insanity, or Commissions of Lunacy, and also provides an illuminating historical perspective on our own day and age, when the mentally ill are mainly treated in home and community.

Itineraries and Languages of Madness in the Early Modern World

Itineraries and Languages of Madness in the Early Modern World
Author: Mariana Labarca
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2021-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000405311

Drawing on a wide range of sources including interdiction procedures, records of criminal justice, documentation from mental hospitals, and medical literature, this book provides a comprehensive study of the spaces in which madness was recorded in Tuscany during the eighteenth century. It proposes the notion of itineraries of madness, which, intended as an heuristic device, enables us to examine records of madness across the different spaces where it was disclosed, casting light on the connections between how madness was understood and experienced, the language employed to describe it, and public and private responses devised to cope with it. Placing the emotional experience of the Tuscan families at the core of its analysis, this book stresses the central role of families in the shaping of new understandings of madness and how lay notions interacted with legal and medical knowledge. It argues that perceptions of madness in the eighteenth century were closely connected to new cultural concerns regarding family relationships and family roles, which resulted in a shift in the meanings of and attitudes to mental disturbances.

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade
Author: Jonathan Andrews
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2003-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520226607

His case book testifies to the scope and prosperity of Monro's "trade in lunacy," and Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull brilliantly exploit the opportunity it affords to look inside the mad-business.".

Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England

Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England
Author: Katharine Hodgkin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351871579

A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.

Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450- c.1850

Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450- c.1850
Author: M. Jenner
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2007-09-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0230591469

What was the medical marketplace? This book provides the first critical examination of medicine and the market in pre-modern England, colonial North America and British India. Chapters explore the most important themes in the social history of medicine and offer a fresh understanding of healthcare in this time of social and economic transformation.