Asylum Writings in Nineteenth-Century Britain
General Editor: Louise Wannell
Volume Editors: Allan Beveridge and Katherine Webb
978 1 85196 624 0: 234x156mm: £350.00/$625.00
Michel Foucault’s seminal Madness and Civilization (1971) pioneered the history of madness as a subject for study. Medical historians have responded with studies of doctors, institutions and treatments. This four-volume edition adds patients’ voices to the discourse. It draws together unpublished writings by inmates of nineteenth-century British asylums, including case reports, patient-written publications, letters and memoirs of asylum life.
The collection reveals a diverse selection of patient voices offering an immediate engagement with insanity and asylum life. Sources shed light on the attitudes of society to insanity; on the medical practices involved in diagnosing, running and administering an asylum; and on what being defined as insane and/ or experiencing insanity was like. The collection thus offers a rare glimpse into immediate reflections upon the experience of madness and incarceration.
Contents
Volume 1
Asylum Case Records: the Official Record
Selected case records from Royal Edinburgh Asylum; Crichton Royal-Dumfries; York Retreat; Broadmoor; Lancaster Moor; Exe Vale Hospital; Hanwell Asylum; Ticehurst Hospital; and Ballamona Isle of Man. Selections are made to represent different class, gender, types of illness and varied durations of stay.
Volume 2
Patients’ News: Asylum Newspapers
A selection of in-house newspapers and magazines produced by nineteeth-century asylum patients. There is a strong representation from Scotland as many English asylums did not introduce patient-written publications until the twentieth century. Where possible individual newspapers will be reproduced in full.
Under the Dome, Bethlem; Morningside Mirror, Royal Edinburgh Asylum; Gartnavel Gazette, Gartnavel Asylum; The Sunnyside Chronicle, Montrose; The New Moon, The Crichton Royal
Volume 3:
Voices from the Asylum
Patients’ Letters and Writings
A selection of patient letters from Broadmoor; York Retrea; Royal Edinburgh Asylum and Colney Hatch. Letters are reproduced in full and selections are made to represent differences in class, gender and types of illness.
Volume 4
After the Asylum: Patients’ Writing Back
Urbane Metcalfe, The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital (1818); E A Smythe, Recent Case of infamous and horrible abduction in London: being the full account ... of the imprisonment in a private mad-house of an American lady by her husband Carmichael Smyth, Esq., etc (1823); Jonathan Martin, The Life of Jonathan Martin of Darlington, Tanner, Written by Himself (1828); Anon, Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer: Being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum (1855); By a Late Inmate of the Glasgow Royal Asylum for Lunatics at Gartnavel [James Frame], The Philosophy of Insanity (1860); Ellen Naish Capper, critique of her stay at York Retreat (1876); Herman Merivale, My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum by a Sane Patient (1879); Clarinda Parry, How Pauper Lunatics are Made and Treated (c.1906); Marcia Hamilcar, Legally Dead. Experiences During Seventeen Weeks Detention in a Private Asylum (1910)