Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum

Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum
Author: Hiram Chase
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2017-11-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780331932324

Excerpt from Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum: From August 20th, 1863, to December 20th, 1865 Another reason which has deterred me from giving to the world the history of those two years, is the fact, that a number of inmates of lunatic 'asylums in this country have given to the public their views of asylum life, and one especially, who was in the asylum at Utica, and discharged just before I entered it. I could not help noticing the effect these productions produced on society. In many instances the history was read only to laugh, and pity the insanity of the writer. This case referred to, was a lady from Syracuse. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum from August 20th, 1863 to December 20th, 1865

Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum from August 20th, 1863 to December 20th, 1865
Author: Chase Hiram
Publisher: Hardpress Publishing
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2016-06-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9781318094325

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum

Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum
Author: Michael Rembis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2025-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197604838

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."

Prisons, Asylums, and the Public

Prisons, Asylums, and the Public
Author: Janet Miron
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802095135

The prisons and asylums of Canada and the United States were a popular destination for institutional tourists in the nineteenth-century. Thousands of visitors entered their walls, recording and describing the interiors, inmates, and therapeutic and reformative practices they encountered in letters, diaries, and articles. Surprisingly, the vast majority of these visitors were not members of the medical or legal elite but were ordinary people. Prisons, Asylums, and the Public argues that, rather than existing in isolation, these institutions were closely connected to the communities beyond their walls. Challenging traditional interpretations of public visiting, Janet Miron examines the implications and imperatives of visiting from the perspectives of officials, the public, and the institutionalized. Finding that institutions could be important centres of civic activity, self-edification, and 'scientific' study, Prisons, Asylums, and the Public sheds new light on popular nineteenth-century attitudes towards the insane and the criminal.

Ethnopsychiatry

Ethnopsychiatry
Author: Atwood D. Gaines
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 1992-08-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438403615

This book outlines a "new ethnopsychiatry," one that considers popular or folk ethnomedicines and professional psychiatric systems in the same discourse, effacing the traditional distinction between psychiatry and ethnopsychiatry. The essays in this volume are from a diverse, interdisciplinary group representing history, psychology, sociology, and medicine, as well as anthropology. The author view both ethnomedical practices and illness as local cultural constructions. They consider ideologies and institutions from both professional and popular ethnopsychiatric systems in America, Western Europe, South Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, and India. The book demonstrates that professional and popular psychiatric medicines lie along the same local cultural continua, that professional, "scientific" psychiatries and less formalized systems of local popular psychology are epistemological relatives, aspects of common cultural discourses on normality and abnormality. The essays reject the notion of a universal, uniform reality of psychopathology beyond cultural boundaries, but the data strongly support the cultural and historically constructed nature of ethnopsychiatry, in its illness, ideologies, and institutions. Contributors to this volume include Amy V. Blue, Thomas Csordas, Ellen Dwyer, Paul E. Farmer, M.D., Atwood D. Gaines, Helena Jia Hershel, Janis Jenkins, Pearl Katz, Thomas Maretzki, Naoki Nomura, Charles Nuckolls, Kathryn Oths, Lorna Amarasingham Rhodes, and Leslie Swartz.

Permeable Walls

Permeable Walls
Author: Graham Mooney
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9042026324

This book is the first book devoted to the history of hospital and asylum visiting and deflects attention from medical history's more traditionally studied constituencies, patients and doctors. Covering the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and taking case studies from around the globe, the authors demonstrate that hospitals and asylums could be remarkably permeable institutions. However, policies towards visitors have varied from outright exclusion, as in the case of some isolation hospitals in Victorian Britain, to near open access in the first Chinese missionary hospitals. Historical studies of visitors and visiting, as a result, tell us much about the changing relationship between healthcare institutions and the communities they serve. These histories are particularly relevant at a time when service providers seek ways to involve patients' representatives in healthcare decision making; to control hospital super-bugs; and to make the hospital environment accessible yet safe and secure. With the re-emergence of restricted visiting, the subject remains one of the most emotive topics in the history of institutional medicine.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability
Author: Clare Barker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107087821

Working across time periods and critical contexts, this volume provides the most comprehensive overview of literary representations of disability.