Gender and insanity in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Abstract

The nineteenth century was a period of considerable social, political, and economic change in Ireland, change that was demonstrated with particular force in relation to the care of the insane. This chapter seeks to examine some of the means through which the insane were re-figured in nineteenth-century Irish society, and looks in particular at popular conceptions of danger, the gender specificity or otherwise of insanity, and the question of celibacy as a precipitating factor in mental illness. The chapter seeks to engage with the ongoing debate in the history of psychiatry over the relative importance of gender as a factor in the admission, treatment, and discharge of the insane.