“Fit localities for an asylum”: the historical geography of the nineteenth-century “mad-business” in England as viewed through the pages of the Asylum Journal

Abstract

The institutions of the mid-nineteenth century “mad-business” in England—the public ssylums, charitable lunatic hospitals and private madhouses—possessed intriguing associations with particular places, regions and environments, but historians have rarely considered the way that these associations prompted serious debates amongst such interested parties as the medical officers of mental establishments, the Government's Commissioners in Lunacy and even the educated public at large. These debates both reflected the existing institutional geography of the “mad-business” and helped to shape subsequent transformations in this geography. Furthermore, these debates were deeply embedded within a whole span of arguments to do with both the nature of “madness” and the operation of appropriate regimes of internment, care and therapy. Through a detailed reading of the first forty issues of the Asylum Journal , a mid-nineteenth century journal dominated principally by the so-called “mad doctors”, it is possible to encounter a sophisticated “medico-moral discourse” overarching more specific debates and arguments, including those which both reflected and helped to shape the institutional geography of the “mad-business” during these years.