Mad doctors? The significance of medical practitioners admitted as patients to the first English county asylums up to 1890

Abstract

‘Mad doctors’ specialized in treating the insane, but what about the doctors whose own mental health was jeopardized? Oppenheim found that doctors who attended the mad were presumed to be particularly vulnerable, but there has been no research investigating this claim, nor identifying practitioners’ experiences as patients. This article analyses medical admissions to asylums via both case notes and other sources such as newspaper reports, revealing the responses of medical superintendents to their former colleagues and, in some cases, the judgements of practitioners on their institutional surroundings. It indicates the impact of work-related stress, as medicine became self-consciously professional, and the evolution of public reactions to doctors who could not maintain an appropriately sane identity.