Critiques, ideals and blueprints in the historical geography of Scotland’s lunatic asylums, 1857–1872

Abstract

ABSTRACT The historical geography of Scotland’s nineteenth-century lunatic asylums has only been lightly researched to date, and particularly under-studied is what might be termed Scotland’s ‘Asylum Age’ – c.1857 into the 1870s – when publicly-funded and purpose-built district asylums started to appear across the Scottish landscape. This was a period of therapeutic optimism about what these asylums could achieve, as curative institutions buttressed by medical and moral ideas about how lunacy should be treated. Using Annual Reports of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland over a fifteen-year period, 1857–1872, this paper explores ‘expert’ criticisms directed at the perceived geographical failings of the pre-1857 establishments housing lunatics (royal asylums, private licensed houses and Poor Law facilities). Attending to the macro and micro-geographies discussed in these Reports, the Commissioners’ ideal for asylum location and architecture is reconstructed, noting how this became a geographical blueprint for the emerging district asylum system. Over the fifteen-year study period, ideas about the ideal site and building shifted once more as lunacy numbers increased and money dwindled, suggesting that the ideal was soon to be overtaken by a more pessimistic turn less sure about the curative benefits of rural sites or homely buildings.