The Cost of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland PDF Download

Author: Alice Mauger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319652443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay explanations of mental illness and its causes, and patient experiences, were influenced by these concepts. The strong emphasis on land and its interconnectedness with notions of class identity and respectability in Ireland lends a particularly interesting dimension. The book interrogates the popular notion that relatives were routinely locked away to be deprived of land or inheritance, querying how often “land grabbing” Irish families really abused the asylum system for their personal economic gain. The book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland and the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland.

Author: Kathryn Burtinshaw
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473879051
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
“Reveals the grisly conditions in which the mentally ill were kept . . . [and] harrowing details of the inhumane and gruesome treatment of these patients.”—Daily Mail In the first half of the nineteenth century, treatment of the mentally ill in Britain and Ireland underwent radical change. No longer manacled, chained and treated like wild animals, patient care was defined in law and medical understanding, and treatment of insanity developed. Focusing on selected cases, this new study enables the reader to understand how progressively advancing attitudes and expectations affected decisions, leading to better legislation and medical practice throughout the century. Specific mental health conditions are discussed in detail and the treatments patients received are analyzed in an expert way. A clear view of why institutional asylums were established, their ethos for the treatment of patients, and how they were run as palaces rather than prisons giving moral therapy to those affected becomes apparent. The changing ways in which patients were treated, and altered societal views to the incarceration of the mentally ill, are explored. The book is thoroughly illustrated and contains images of patients and asylum staff never previously published, as well as first-hand accounts of life in a nineteenth-century asylum from a patient’s perspective. Written for genealogists as well as historians, this book contains clear information concerning access to asylum records and other relevant primary sources and how to interpret their contents in a meaningful way. “Through the use of case studies, this book adds a personal note to the historiography in a way that is often missing from scholarly works.”—Federation of Family History Societies

Author: Damien Brennan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136237070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
The national public asylum system in Ireland was established during the early nineteenth century and continued to operate up to the close of the twentieth century. These asylums / mental hospitals were a significant physical and social feature of Irish communities. They were used intensively and provided a convenient form of institutional intervention to manage a host of social problems. Irish Insanity identifies the long-term trends in institutional residency through the development of a detailed empirical data set, based on an analysis of original copies of the reports of Inspector of Asylums/Mental Hospitals in Ireland. Damien Brennan explores core social and historical features linked to this data including: the political context governance and social policy the relationship between church and state changing economic structures and social deprivation professionalization legislation and systems of admission and discharge categorisation and diagnostic criteria international developments family dynamics This book demonstrates that the actual rate of asylum utilisation in Ireland was the highest by international standards, but challenges the idea that an "epidemic of Irish insanity" actually existed. Offering a historical and sociological insight into an institutional legacy that is unusual within the international context, this book will be of particular relevance and interest to scholars within the fields of sociology, criminology, law, history, Irish studies, social policy, anthropology, nursing and medicine.

Author: Jennifer Wallis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319567144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the ‘truth’ of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.

Author: Steven Taylor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137600276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book explores the treatment, administration, and experience of children and young people certified as insane in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It uses a range of sources from Victorian institutions to explore regional differences, rural and urban comparisons, and categories of mental illness and mental disability. The discussion of diverse pathways in and out of the asylum offers an opportunity to reassess nineteenth-century child mental impairment in a broad social-cultural context, and its conclusions widen the parameters of a ‘mixed economy of care’ by introducing multiple sites of treatment and confinement. Through its expansive scope the analysis intersects with topics such as the history of childhood, institutional culture, urbanisation, regional economic development, welfare history, and philanthropy.

Author: Stef Eastoe
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030273350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explores the understudied history of the so-called ‘incurables’ in the Victorian period, the people identified as idiots, imbeciles and the weak-minded, as opposed to those thought to have curable conditions. It focuses on Caterham, England’s first state imbecile asylum, and analyses its founding, purpose, character, and most importantly, its residents, innovatively recreating the biographies of these people. Created to relieve pressure on London’s overcrowded workhouses, Caterham opened in September 1870. It was originally intended as a long-stay institution for the chronic and incurable insane paupers of the metropolis, more commonly referred to as idiots and imbeciles. This purpose instantly differentiates Caterham from the more familiar, and more researched, lunatic asylums, which were predicated on the notion of cure and restoration of the senses. Indeed Caterham, built following the welfare and sanitary reforms of the late 1860s, was an important feature of the Victorian institutional landscape, and it represented a shift in social, medical and political responsibility towards the care and management of idiot and imbecile paupers.

Author: Patrick Tracey
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553905597
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.

Author: Pauline M. Prior
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
ISBN: 1911024620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This book is a collection of studies on mental health services in Ireland from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. Essays cover overall trends in patient numbers, an exploration of the development of mental health law in Ireland, and studies on individual hospitals – all of which provide incredible insight into times past and yet speak volumes about mental health in contemporary Irish society. Topics include the famous nursing strike at Monaghan Asylum in 1919, when a red flag was raised over the building; extracts from Speedwell, a hospital newsletter, showing the social and sporting life at Holywell Hospital during the 1960s; an exploration of diseases such as beriberi and tuberculosis at Dundrum and the Richmond in the 1890s; the problems encountered by doctors in Ballinasloe Asylum as they tried to exert their authority over the Governors; and the experiences of Irish emigrants who found themselves in asylums in Australia and New Zealand. The book also includes a discussion of mental health services in Ireland 1959–2010, the first time such a chronology has been published. The editor, Pauline Prior, and the contributors, including Brendan Kelly, Dermot Walsh, Elizabeth Malcolm and E.M. Crawford, are well-known scholars within the disciplines of medicine, sociology and history, coming together for the first time to present an essential book on the history of mental health services in Ireland.

Author: Alice Mauger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781013270284
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay explanations of mental illness and its causes, and patient experiences, were influenced by these concepts. The strong emphasis on land and its interconnectedness with notions of class identity and respectability in Ireland lends a particularly interesting dimension. The book interrogates the popular notion that relatives were routinely locked away to be deprived of land or inheritance, querying how often "land grabbing" Irish families really abused the asylum system for their personal economic gain. The book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland and the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Author: Amy Milne-Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526155044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Out of His Mind interrogates how Victorians made sense of the madman as both a social reality and a cultural representation. Even at the height of enthusiasm for the curative powers of nineteenth-century psychiatry, to be certified as a lunatic meant a loss of one’s freedom and in many ways one’s identify. Because men had the most power and authority in Victorian Britain, this also meant they had the most to lose. The madman was often a marginal figure, confined in private homes, hospitals, and asylums. Yet as a cultural phenomenon he loomed large, tapping into broader social anxieties about respectability, masculine self-control, and fears of degeneration. Using a wealth of case notes, press accounts, literature, medical and government reports, this text provides a rich window into public understandings and personal experiences of men’s insanity.