Customers and Patrons of the Mad-trade

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-trade
Author: Jonathan Andrews
Publisher:
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2002
Genre: Mentally ill
ISBN: 9781597345682

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.

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade

Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade
Author: Jonathan Andrews
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2003-01-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0520926080

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.

Making Mental Health

Making Mental Health
Author: Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2024-08-07
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040103200

Making Mental Health: A Critical History historicises mental health by examining the concept from the ‘madness’ of the late nineteenth century to the changing ideas about its contemporary concerns and status. It argues that a critical approach to the history of psychiatry and mental health shows them to constitute a dual clinical-political project that gathered pace over the course of the twentieth century and continues to resonate in the present. Drawing on scholarship across several areas of historical inquiry as well as historical and contemporary clinical literature, the book uses a thematic approach to highlight decisive moments that demonstrate the stakes of this engagement in Anglo-American contexts. By tracing the (unfinished) history of institutions, the search for cures for psychiatric distress, the growing interest of the nation-state in mental health, the history of attempts to globalise psychiatry, the controversies over the politics of diagnostic categories that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of theorising about the relationship between the psyche and the market, the book offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of mental health into a commonplace concern. Addressing key questions in the fields of history, medical humanities, and the social sciences, as well as in the psychiatry disciplines themselves, the book is an essential contribution to an ongoing conversation about mental distress and its meanings.

The Certification of Insanity

The Certification of Insanity
Author: Filippo Maria Sposini
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3031427424

This book represents the first systematic study of the certification of lunacy in the British Empire. Considering a variety of legal, archival, and published sources, it traces the origins and dissemination of a peculiar method for determining mental unsoundness defined as the ‘Victorian system’. Shaped by the dynamics surrounding the clandestine committal of wealthy Londoners in private madhouses, this system featured three distinctive tenets: standardized forms, independent medical examinations, and written facts of insanity. Despite their complexity, Victorian certificates achieved a remarkable success. Not only did they survive in the UK for more than a century, but they also served as a model for the development of mental health laws around the world. By the start of the Second World War, more than seventy colonial and non-colonial jurisdictions adopted the Victorian formula for making lunacy official with some countries still relying on it to this very day. Using case studies from Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific, this book charts the temporal and geographical trajectory of an imperial technology used to determine a person’s destiny. Shifting the focus from metropolitan policies to colonial dynamics, and from macro developments to micro histories, it explores the perspectives of families, doctors, and public officials as they began to deal with the delicate business of certification. This book will be of interest to scholars working on mental health policy, the history of medicine, disability studies, and the British Empire.

Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, c. 1770-1820

Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, c. 1770-1820
Author: Mark Neuendorf
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2021-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030843564

This book explores the ways which people navigated the emotions provoked by the mad in Britain across the long eighteenth century. Building upon recent advances in the historical study of emotions, it plots the evolution of attitudes towards insanity, and considers how shifting emotional norms influenced the development of a ‘humanitarian’ temperament, which drove the earliest movements for psychiatric reform in England and Scotland. Reacting to a ‘culture of sensibility’, which encouraged tears at the sight of tender suffering, early asylum reformers chose instead to express their humanity through unflinching resolve, charging into madhouses to contemplate scenes of misery usually hidden from public view, and confronting the authorities that enabled neglect to flourish. This intervention required careful emotional management, which is documented comprehensively here for the first time. Drawing upon a wide array of medical and literary sources, this book provides invaluable insights into pre-modern attitudes towards insanity.

Martin Folkes (1690-1754)

Martin Folkes (1690-1754)
Author: Anna Marie Roos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0192565656

Martin Folkes (1690-1754): Newtonian, Antiquary, Connoisseur is a cultural and intellectual biography of the only President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Sir Isaac Newton's protégé, astronomer, mathematician, freemason, art connoisseur, Voltaire's friend and Hogarth's patron, his was an intellectually vibrant world. Folkes was possibly the best-connected natural philosopher and antiquary of his age, an epitome of Enlightenment sociability, and yet he was a surprisingly neglected figure, the long shadow of Newton eclipsing his brilliant disciple. A complex figure, Folkes edited Newton's posthumous works in biblical chronology, yet was a religious skeptic and one of the first members of the gentry to marry an actress. His interests were multidisciplinary, from his authorship of the first complete history of the English coinage, to works concerning ancient architecture, statistical probability, and astronomy. Rich archival material, including Folkes's travel diary, correspondence, and his library and art collections permit reconstruction through Folkes's eyes of what it was like to be a collector and patron, a Masonic freethinker, and antiquarian and virtuoso in the days before 'science' became sub-specialised. Folkes's virtuosic sensibility and possible role in the unification of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society tells against the historiographical assumption that this was the age in which the 'two cultures' of the humanities and sciences split apart, never to be reunited. In Georgian England, antiquarianism and 'science' were considered largely part of the same endeavour.

Romantic Autopsy

Romantic Autopsy
Author: Arden Hegele
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192848348

This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts.

Rhyming Reason

Rhyming Reason
Author: Michelle Faubert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 131731431X

During the Romantic era, psychology and literature enjoyed a fluid relationship. Faubert focuses on psychologist-poets who grew out of the literary-medical culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. They used poetry as an accessible form to communicate emerging psychological, cultural and moral ideas.

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England
Author: D. Rabin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2004-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230505090

During the eighteenth century English defendants, victims, witnesses, judges, and jurors spoke a language of the mind. With their reputations or lives at stake, men and women presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. Inside the courtroom the language of excuse reshaped crimes and punishments, signalling a shift in the age-old negotiation of mitigation. Outside the courtroom the language of the mind reflected society's preoccupation with questions of sensibility, responsibility, and the self.

A history of disability in England

A history of disability in England
Author: Simon Jarrett
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1835536190

Throughout history numerous individuals with disabilities have had to pit themselves against huge obstacles placed in their way because of the type of person they were born as, the type of person they became through accident, illness or circumstances, or the type of person they have been perceived as. This book tells the story of how disabled people have done this, how they have seen themselves, how they have been perceived and treated by others and how they have influenced society. People with disabilities have always been a part of English society and this concise thousand-year history ranges from the surprisingly integrated communities of the medieval and early modern periods to the institutionalisation of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sometimes the history of disability is described as a hidden history. This book argues that it is no such thing. The history of people with disabilities is often in front of our eyes, yet we frequently choose to ignore it, or simply do not see it. Accounts of daily life, events, art, literature, family histories and political debate have always featured people with disabilities who are there for all to see, but too often observers, particularly non-disabled observers, gaze straight past them.