Abstract
Interest surrounding the Victorian county asylum network and its treatment of mental illness has been, and still remains, somewhat substantial. This article will add to, and expand, the existing literature by redressing the geographical imbalance of previous institutional research. Asylum histories have centred upon establishments in prominent towns and cities, and on those with an importance to the evolution of the psychiatry profession, for example the York Retreat. Apart from the examinations of Lancashire and Yorkshire asylums, little exists in the far North of England. This article will specifically use the records of the Cumberland and Westmorland Joint Lunatic Asylum to show the experience of pauper patients from a rural, Northern locality. Particular attention will be paid to the circulation of patients in and out of the asylum to build a comprehensive picture of the nineteenth-century transferral of care. To fully understand the treatment of mental health in this period, one cannot solely look at the asylum, as it formed only one part of a whole system of care.
Highlights
Focussing on the Cumberland and Westmorland Joint lunatic asylum, this article will look at how the lunatic population were circulated around different institutions of care in a northern, rural locality in the latter half of the nineteenth century
The only way children would make it into an asylum was if they were proved to pose a danger to those around them. (Adair, Forsythe and Melling 1997: 372) There is nothing in the asylum rules and regulations to suggest that children were not welcome in the Garlands Hospital, but it is possible that the medical staff believed they were better kept in the workhouse, or at home in the care of their families, as they did not have the space or a separate ward for infant patients
There have been several examinations of other Victorian asylums, there is an absence of research into the institutions situated in the far North of England
Summary
Focussing on the Cumberland and Westmorland Joint lunatic asylum, this article will look at how the lunatic population were circulated around different institutions of care in a northern, rural locality in the latter half of the nineteenth century. (Adair, Forsythe and Melling 1997: 372) There is nothing in the asylum rules and regulations to suggest that children were not welcome in the Garlands Hospital, but it is possible that the medical staff believed they were better kept in the workhouse, or at home in the care of their families, as they did not have the space or a separate ward for infant patients This was not untypical for asylums of this era, as the lunacy legislation did not specify the age limits of admission, and it did not establish separate provisions for insane children. As the problems of the industrial revolution grew, the Irish migrants provided a perfect ‘scapegoat for disease, overcrowding, immorality, drunkenness and crime’. (MacRaild 1999: 155)
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