Through the work of historians since Foucault, the growth of public and voluntary institutions for the insane from the late eighteenth century has been associated with the bourgeoisie's desire for social order and social control in a period of rapid economic and political change. In addition, the importance of psychiatrists' quest for professional status and security has also been emphasised as a motor of institutional proliferation throughout the nineteenth century. However, as Charlotte MacKenzie points out, neither of these models is easily applicable to the development of the private...
Through the work of historians since Foucault, the growth of public and voluntary institutions for the insane from the late eighteenth century has bee...
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...
Through an examination of the fascinating lives and careers of a series of nineteenth-century "mad-doctors," Masters of Bedlam provides a un...
