Asylum Movement Research Articles

The history of the history of learning disability

AbstractThis article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disability. It identifies three major waves of historical approaches beginning with a medicalised analysis which emerged in the early 20th century. This presented a story of medical progress which began with the asylum movement of the 19th century and represented ‘idiots’ as creatures of the asylum and objects of the medicalised gaze. In the 1990s a new social history challenged these assumptions, focusing on the iniquities of institutionalisation and the eugenics period, while attempting to give a voice to people with learning disabilities and their families in their own history. A cultural history movement later emerged to challenge the idea of learning disability as a fixed universal concept over time. It argued that the idea of learning disability (in all its different linguistic iterations) is contingent on time and place, and a product of the culture within which it is framed. Not all work fits neatly into one of these categories, sometimes they overlap and sometimes they cannot be easily categorised. Nevertheless, these broad frames of reference within the historiography of learning disability do point to wider social, cultural and political concerns, which are worth holding in mind as we consider how the ‘work’ of history can and does act to inform attitudes, policy‐making and change. The authors describe the encouraging recent emergence of historian activists who seek to write and define their own history, and who may constitute a fourth wave in the historiography of learning disability.

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

Our Future is Now

Our Future is Now

Change, Challenge and Opportunity: Psychiatry in Age of Reform and Enlightenment

Change, Challenge and Opportunity: Psychiatry in Age of Reform and Enlightenment

Küreselleşme Olgusu Bağlamında Yeni Güvenlik Algısı

The uncertainty that had followed the demise of the Cold War, at which time the enemy was apparent, threats were obvious and the appropriate response to those threats could easily be determined, as well as the acceleration of globalisation led to a series of changes in how the notion of security should be conceived. As a consequence, it has increasingly become difficult to come up with a definition of security that is easily understood, reliable and long-lasting. Nor could the boundaries and contours of the concept be established in mutual terms. Since the question of whose security could no longer be answered with a traditional and automatic response, that was the nation-state and individuals as well as non-state actors needed to be taken into account. Again, threats have been evolving from their classic status of being cross-border in origin and military in form into one whose source, timing and form could no longer be easily predicted while the frontiers of the new battle-lines appeared to be the entire world. As the concept of security acquired new meaning, international terrorism, organized crime groups, cyber terror, states with hostile intents, proliferation of conventional weapons and weapons of mass-destruction have been reformed into physical threats. Assaults towards national economies, international economic order or financial markets, aggressions committed against wealth, health and the environment, migratory and asylum movements have begun to form the new threats to national interest. Yet again offences committed against universal democratic values, human rights and freedoms have been lined up as threats to common values.

‘Visitation by God’: rationalizing death in the Victorian asylum

This article argues that death from insanity raised serious questions for the medical profession and for those who promoted the public asylum movement in the nineteenth century. While the medical emphasis on the somatic origins of insanity was increasingly accepted, limited observable signs of disease in the brain at post-mortem made it difficult to explain cause of death. This posed problems for a growing county asylum movement which was justified on the basis that insanity was a treatable disease and thus mortality rates would naturally decline. As asylum populations continued to grow and mortality rates remained little changed, statistics on lunacy ultimately became not the predicted measure of success but instead clear evidence of failure.

Sanity in the South Atlantic: The mythos of Philippe Pinel and the asylum movement in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

This article chronicles the asylum movement in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It narrates the ways in which medical reformers launched an asylum-building campaign. While their call to construct an asylum was based on local political and medical circumstances, its intellectual impetus came from the Atlantic marketplace of ideas. Political and intellectual currents in France inspired doctors intent on transforming the management of madness. Specifically, the political context from which French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) articulated a regime of more humane medical treatment for the mentally ill, known as “moral treatment,” became a grounding mythology from which reformers advocated for the construction of an asylum. As such, the history of the socio-political and cultural processes that led to the creation of the first public asylum in Latin America, the Hospício Dom Pedro II, is both a Brazilian story and an Atlantic narrative.

Encyclopedia of American disability history

Like race and gender, disability history has recently become a critical field of study in examining our nation's heritage. Sparked by the disability rights movement of the late 20th century, disability history both expands and challenges the traditional American narrative of self-reliance, individualism, and opportunity and yields new understandings of such bedrock American values as community, family, and citizenship. From the asylum movement of the 19th century and the cover-up of Franklin Roosevelt's paralysis during his presidency to the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act and the impact of every war on veterans' physical and mental health, the experience of disability - and society's reaction to it - has changed markedly from one era to the next. The definitions of disability have also changed since the colonial era, revealing competing views, approaches, and attitudes. Encyclopedia of American Disability History is the first encyclopedia to focus on this important topic in American history. By examining the issues, events, people, activism, laws, and personal experiences and social ramifications of disability throughout U.S. history, this comprehensive three-volume reference provides a new and broader, more inclusive approach to our nation's past. More than 300 historians, scholars, and experts contributed to the more than 750 articles in this impressive work. Arranged alphabetically, each signed article includes cross-references to related entries and suggestions for further reading. Ideal for the high school and college curriculum, this accessible new encyclopedia also includes a comprehensive chronology and dozens of original documents. Entries include: Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf; Amputees and amputation; Asperger's Syndrome; Blind Boys of Alabama; Buck v. Bell; Disability art and artistic expression; Down Syndrome; Eugenics; Thomas Gallaudet; The Glass Menagerie; Guide dogs; Impairment/impaired; Little People of America; Long-term care; Million Dollar Baby; Miss Deaf America; Reproductive rights; South Park; Special Olympics; Ugly Laws; Workers' compensation; and The Yellow Wallpaper.

Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (review)

Reviewed by: Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 Jonathan Andrews Leonard Smith . Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830. Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine. London: Routledge, 2007. xvii + 288 pp. Ill. $135.00 (ISBN-10: 0-415-37516-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-415-37516-0). In the two decades since the publication of Roy Porter's Mind-Forg'd Manacles (1987), Leonard Smith has deservedly emerged as one of the leading and most productive researchers on the history of English psychiatry. His surveys of nineteenth-century asylumdom, mad-doctoring, and the private mad-business have been particularly useful and well referenced, produced—somewhat miraculously—while sustaining a full-time professional career in the mental health services. His latest work sees his research chronology extended as far back as the mid-eighteenth century and provides us with a superb complementary companion [End Page 791] to his earlier Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody (1999). This study is hugely welcome, constituting, remarkably, the first to offer separate in-depth analysis of the voluntary and subscription generation of lunatic hospitals that emerged in England starting in 1751, from St. Luke's, Newcastle, Manchester, York, and Liverpool to Leicester, Exeter, Lincoln, and Oxford. Smith's main aims in this book are twofold: to accord these hospitals a more significant, "rightful" (p. 4) place in the evolution of care and treatment for the mentally disordered and to emphasize the importance of what he terms "the medical model" and the key "leadership" role of physicians (p. 5) in these institutions' management and delivery of services. In pursuit of both objectives, Smith delivers cogent, well-substantiated arguments. He offers persuasive evidence of the significant translation of the core ethos and orientations that had originated in the voluntary lunatic hospital sector to the county asylum movement that followed. His wide-ranging coverage of the identities, interests, and conflicts of the key emerging specialists in mad-doctoring associated with this new generation of lunatic hospitals (from William Battie, Thomas Arnold, and John Ferriar to Samuel Foart Simmons) is combined with instructive portrayals of some of the less familiar lunatic hospital practitioners (including James Vaughan and John Hall). Significantly, his attention to the praxis-oriented concerns of medical men is admirably textured by attention to their broader economic, sociocultural, political, and career-promotion activities. The meticulous research that has distinguished Smith's many other notable contributions to the field is constantly and reassuringly on view here. This reviewer would contest the extent to which doctors are privileged as actors in Smith's account above lay governors, subscribers, benefactors, and managers (by contrast, e.g., with Michael Brown's studies of York asylum).1 One might also challenge the odd passing assertion, such as the claim that private madhouses did not cater to paupers until "later in the eighteenth century" (p. 3). Yet Smith's survey is almost invariably highly authoritative, reliable, and informative in its navigation of the empirical and historiographical terrain. Smith's approach (already significantly rehearsed in his 1999 study) is characterized by regular reference to the "custody versus cure" "paradox" (e.g., p. 5). Thus, he skirts the middle ground between emphasizing the harsher, more "custodial," extirpatory dimensions of Georgian provision for the insane, while substantiating its significant therapeutically oriented and "philanthropic" features, stressing the higher "aspirations" of managers and reformers. Smith also highlights the multiplicity of concerns these institutions reflected, whether they had to do with "altruism," "civic pride," or political influence/patronage, and the philosophical and policy emphases and shifts over the period. The structure of the book, which opens with a section on St. Luke's, followed by chapters on "provincial lunatic hospitals," "management and staffing," "the physician's domain," patient admissions and backgrounds (under "proper objects"), with a penultimate section [End Page 792] on the dissonance/decline "from [the] aspirations" of Georgian lunacy provision "to [the] actuality," especially in the first decades of the nineteenth century, is relatively conventional but is eminently coherent and serviceable in fulfilling the author's brief. Although one might wish for more attention to patients' own views of their confinement and to the wider familial and local parochial authorities' concerns and expectations, which were...

Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture Matthew Gambino Benjamin Reiss. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xi + 237 pp. Ill. $50.00, £26.00 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-226-70963-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70963-5), $20.00, £10.50 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-226-70964-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70964-2). In this felicitous study, literary historian Benjamin Reiss seeks to recreate an era in U.S. history when the proper response to mental illness was debated alongside fundamental questions of freedom and democracy. His focus is the period extending from the 1830s through the 1870s, when the asylum movement first appeared, came of age, and began to confront the challenges of long-term custodial care. In the course of his analysis, Reiss examines both “the institutional processing of culture” (primarily the literary and dramatic productions of patients) and the “cultural processing of the institution” (the role of the asylum in the lives and fiction of selected American writers) (p. 17), drawing intelligently on the still-contentious historiographic debates about the nature of the asylum. Of particular interest is Reiss’s study of patient culture at the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, where a group of educated patients in the 1850s produced a journal known as The Opal. Most contributors chose to remain anonymous, a decision that Reiss contextualizes with considerable skill. He finds both a “public transcript” and a “hidden transcript” in The Opal (p. 25), questioning sociologist Erving Goffman’s claim that such publications reflect only the official line on asylum life. Reiss also documents a hitherto unexplored dimension of institutional culture: patients’ embrace of blackface minstrelsy at Utica in intramural theatrical performances at mid-century. Here he expertly analyzes the complex semiotic resonances and reversals involved in such an enterprise. Reiss then turns to the case of the messianic poet Jones Very, whose association with the transcendentalists tested the limits of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s devotion to personal liberty. Emerson, we learn, raised no objection to Very’s confinement in 1838 at McLean Asylum outside Boston. Far from being at odds with the asylum movement, the transcendentalists expressed many of the same concerns as medical superintendents about the impact of market forces on American culture. Themes of liberty and confinement recur in Reiss’s examination of patient-activist Elizabeth Packard’s campaign to reform commitment laws during the 1860s. Although nineteenth-century fiction often depicted women as emotionally unstable, popular novels also contained frequent images of the unjustly confined woman. This created a narrow rhetorical window through which female patients could voice their protests in the public sphere. For male patients, in contrast, to acknowledge having been deemed incapable of self-government was to undercut the basis of one’s own masculine authority. Theaters of Madness works best as a collection of essays, with those chapters that stray furthest from Reiss’s stated goals being among the least compelling. When it comes to the writings by asylum superintendents on the genius of William Shakespeare, Reiss argues that these physicians used Shakespeare to establish a measure of cultural legitimacy for their still-novel professional worldview. If their intended audience was the educated public at large, however, we are left to wonder [End Page 615] why asylum physicians published this work overwhelmingly in medical journals. Reiss’s reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” takes us to the French Revolution and le geste de Pinel, but his excursions in the historiography are of unclear relevance for the book’s broader argument. Here Reiss also strays occasionally from the conventions of historical reasoning, as when he suggests that Poe’s story “anticipates” (p. 166) contemporary debates in disability studies. These criticisms notwithstanding, Theaters of Madness remains a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the nineteenth-century asylum. If Reiss’s literary approach occasionally leads him to favor intensive analysis over comprehensive exposition, his insights are nevertheless welcome at a time when fresh perspectives are infrequent in the field. Ultimately, Reiss’s work represents a strong argument for cross-disciplinary conversation...

Lunacy and the `Islands in the British Seas'

In the mid-nineteenth century the Dependent Territories of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man all had small, relatively stable populations, many of whom did not speak English as their first language. The response of each to the public asylum movement was very different. Guernsey had an asylum by 1852, but Jersey and the Isle of Man opened permanent asylums only in 1868. This comparative study examines the interactions between British government agencies, the Home Office, Commissioners in Lunacy and Lieutenant Governors, and the autonomous insular legislatures. It discusses the reasons why Jersey and the Isle of Man were reluctant to establish publicly funded asylums, the alternatives considered, and the opportunities afforded to private madhouse proprietors by absent or lax supervisory frameworks.

Choice or circumstance: The UK as the location of asylum applications by Bosnian and Somali refugees

Questions concerning why asylum seekers make their applications in particular countries rather than others have not been fully researched. Some explanation can be found via aggregate migration theories, but there is a need to consider the circumstances of individual movers. Respondents here were drawn from amongst Bosnian and Somali refugees in northern England. The interviews showed that asylum movement is of a variety of types, with two stage migration commonly involved – firstly immediate flight to a neighbouring haven, and secondly on to a more permanent place of settlement. Very few respondents had any real choice in where they ended up. Instead, family circumstances, cultural connections, and the actions of a variety of institutions produced scenarios in which there was generally no alternative to the actual destination arrived at. It is suggested that a mix of individual level and institutional explanations is needed to understand patterns of asylum destinations.

Asylum applications in the European Union: patterns and trends and the effects of policy measures.

"Statistics on asylum applications have been used in a highly selective way in the debates on refugees and asylum policies in Western Europe, to justify restrictive measures. This paper provides a more systematic analysis of these statistics. It focuses on the pattern of origins and destinations for asylum seekers in the European Union in the period 1985-1994.... When the patterns of origin and destinations are compared for separate years, it becomes clear that the destinations of asylum movements have been constantly changing. Though some of the more remarkable shifts were clearly related to policy measures in the relevant countries, many measures produced only limited effects or failed to have any effect at all."

Readmissions of long-stay psychiatric patients to the acute services from hostels in the community

The asylum movement was developed in the 19th century to provide care and cure for people with mental disorders. In the 20th century the old vision of asylum was abandoned, but no new alternative vision of community mental health care has taken its place. A divide between acute psychiatric services and provision for the social aspects of care has been described by Murphy (1991).

Dorothea Dix and the English Origins of the American Asylum Movement

In January 1843, Dorothea Lynde Dix, an obscure, middle-aged Boston spinster, known, if at all, as a schoolteacher and sometime author of re- ligious books, submitted a sensational petition to the Massachusetts Gen- eral Court. In its pages she claimed to expose the appalling condition of pauper lunatics throughout the state, county by county, town by town. "I proceed, Gentlemen," she announced, "briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!" (Dix, Memorial, 1843, 4). These words are from the opening of Dix's Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, long recognized as the touchstone of the American asylum movement, and among the most power- ful documents ever written in the history of American social reform. Sam- uel Gridley Howe, who had just the month before won a seat in the lower house of the assembly, admiringly likened its impact to a discharge of "red- hot shot into the very hearts of the people" (Howe to Dix, n.d./January/ 1843, as quoted in Tiffany 1890, 89).

Immigration and free trade with Mexico: protecting American workers against double jeopardy

Free trade may well increase immigration from Mexico to the United States before ultimately slowing it down. Rapid population growth, unemployment or underemployment of half the labor force, and vast ethnic and kinship links to the United States have given Mexican migration a stubborn momentum. Increased prosperity from free trade will give many would-be migrants the means to resettle in the U. S. Foreign competition will displace Mexican workers in small farms, state-owned enterprises, and less competitive industries, forcing some to migrate. The noneconomic incentives and expectations driving migration will also remain strong. Mexicans may see free trade as making the border a mere formality or as conferring an entitlement to live in the United States. On the U. S. side, free trade may well deepen the government's traditional complacency about border controls. Over the long-term, however, a successful free trade agreement could reduce immigration by improving Mexico's democracy and the quality of life, diminishing the prospects of mass asylum movements from Mexico, creating a better climate for effective family planning, and luring marginal, immigration-magnet industries from the U. S. to Mexico. In the United States, less- skilled American workers in some industries and regions can expect job displacement and other disruptions from free trade. Particularly vulnerable will be workers in perishable crop agriculture, border retail trade, construction, apparel, and light manufacturing such as furniture, auto parts and glass. Continued heavy immigration of Mexican and other foreign workers into those industries and communities will further impede the adjustment of resident workers by competing for jobs and consuming public resources needed for retraining and job search. To ease the adjustment of displaced workers, the U. S. must make Mexico's cooperation in restraining immigration a condition for free trade. Mexico's cooperation should include enforcement of its own laws against clandestine border crossing; action against alien smugglers, document forgers and transiting illegal aliens from Central America; and curbs on the reentry of aliens deported from the United States. U.S. initiatives that would cushion vulnerable American workers against the added disruption of immigration would be: better identification and screening of applicants for public assistance; tightened enforcement of safety and labor standards in immigrant-impacted firms and provision of legal workers to such firms; protection of public assistance resources through better screening and identification of applicants; and curbs on imports of temporary foreign workers for firms that will now have access to Mexican labor in Mexico. Finally, the United States must consistently press Mexico for higher safety, environmental and labor standards at the workplace to improve the job satisfaction and quality of life of working Mexicans who might otherwise migrate, as well as to narrow Mexico's labor cost advantages over the United States.

The cult of curability and the doctrine of perfectibility: social context of the nineteenth-century American asylum movement.

This paper attempts to describe the social context of the mid-nineteenth century American mental asylum movement from the perspective of ideologies that then prevailed. Enthusiasm for evangelically-inspired reforms and, in particular, for the pietistic doctrine of the perfectibility of man, fostered optimism about the curability of insanity through moral treatment. As such enthusiasm waned, so did the 'cult of curability' of insanity and the use of moral treatment.

The rise and decline of the American asylum movement in the 19th century.

This paper traces the history of the American public asylum from the 1840s through the late 19th century. The focus is on social factors that contributed to the establishment of public institutions at the urging of reformers, the attempts to model them on the architecture and "moral treatment" offered by the best private institutions, the crowding of the asylums, the growing criticism aimed at the asylums and their superintendents, and the effects of calls for other approaches and for scientific management. Knowledge of the asylum's history may be useful today, as we stand at the crossroads in the treatment of the mentally ill.

From morality to madness: a reappraisal of the asylum movement in psychiatry 1800-1940.

This essay outlines the history of the asylum movement in psychiatry, but from a somewhat different angle than usual. It attempts to delineate the historical interactions between perceptions of morality and of madness. Changes in these interactions relate to the rise of the asylum movement, around 1800, and its demise, just after World War II. I argue that, whilst insanity was defined against the rational, secular morality of the eighteenth century, it could be separated from immorality and put aside into its asylum. Once mechanistic science and medical scientism began, during the nineteenth century, to include immorality in the systems of disease, the distinction could not hold. The asylums became flooded with the immoral, and management became custodial and nihilistic. This nexus was broken when the asylums were defined, by a few revolutionary superintendents, as instruments of social control. Nevertheless, intellectual paradigms derived from asylum psychiatry persist.

On the Past and Present Provision for the Insane in the United States

As the Hospitals for the Insane in the United States of America have recently been prominently brought before the medical profession in England, it may not be uninteresting to the readers of this Journal to have a slight historical sketch of what may be called the past asylum movement in the States. I am not aware that this has been given before in any journal or work published in Great Britian. The peculiar difficulties of a new country, peopled by different races, and the constantly disturbing influence of immigration, ought to be borne in mind in this narrative. These difficulties are too frequently overlooked. In a letter I received from Miss Dix two years ago, she writes—“We have an amazing burden in all our charitable institutions of every class of disabled foreigners of all ages and in all stages of feeble or quite broken down conditions of health.”