The Destabilization of Domestic Psychiatry

Abstract

In Madness at home: the psychiatrist, the patient, and the family in England, l820–1860, Akihito Suzuki examines the forces that undermined, or as he puts it, destabilized, domestic psychiatry: the caring for lunatic family members at home. Standard accounts of the process by which families “lost the treatment franchise” have routinely focused on the rise of the asylum and the coming of the (mad) doctor. But by mining an unusual source—newspaper reports of commissions of lunacy from l825 to l861—Suzuki has put to marvellous effect some l96 accounts of the actors, the language, the depositions, as well as the public and professional reaction to the shifting meanings of lunacy in an era noted for qualitative change in both civil and criminal jurisprudence. In addressing how domestic care of the mad lost its legitimacy, he deftly engages a host of issues dear to the heart of historians of medicine: the vagaries that surround a clinical diagnosis, the yawning gap that opens between professed medical opinion and actual medical practice, the motives thought to animate various actors who participated in the designation and sequestration of the mad in nineteenth-century England.