Psychiatrists and historical 'facts' Part Two: Re-writing the history of asylumdom

History of Psychiatry

Volumn 6, Issue 23, 1995, Pages 387-394

  Scull, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; MENTAL DISEASE; MENTAL HOSPITAL; UNITED KINGDOM;

GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 18TH CENT.; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 19TH CENT.; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 20TH CENT.; HOSPITALS, PSYCHIATRIC; MENTAL DISORDERS;

EID: 0029372783     PISSN: 0957154X     EISSN: 17402360     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X9500602306     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. J. L. Crammer, ‘English asylums and English doctors: where Scull is wrong’, History of Psychiatry, v (1994), 103–115.
2. The Most Solitary of Afflictions, 5.
3. The Most Solitary of Afflictions, 173, 378.
4. A. Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder, 197–200.
5. See P. McCandless, Liberty and lunacy: the Victorians and wrongful confinement’, in A. 5>cull (ed.), Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 339–62. Ironically, since alienists were perceived to have potentially corrupt reasons for certifying the wealthy, their participation in the certification process was hedged about with legal constraints that did not apply to their medical brethren who lacked specialized knowledge of insanity. (For paupers, where corrupt motives for confinementt were presumed not to exist, a single medical certificate sufficed.)
6. Cf. IN. Hervey, The Lunacy Commssion 1845–60, With Special Reference to the Implementation of Policy in Kent and Surrey’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Bristol University, 1987.
7. Dr Crammer's criticism of my work on this point requires a wilful confusion between the claim that in the Victorian age, ‘the asylum was the sole officially approved response to the problem posed by mental illness' and the very different assertion (which I nowhere make) that it was the sole response to the problem of die mentally disordered. See The Most Solitary of Afflictions, 122–32, 155–65.
8. J. L. Crammer, English asylum’, 106.
9. To the fair, Dr Crammer has belatedly acknowledged the last point. See correction, History of Psychiatry, v (1994), 395.
10. idem., ‘A slavish bowing down: the Lunacy Commssion and the psychiatric profession 1845–1860,’ in W. F. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness, Volume 2 (London: Tavistock, 1985), 98–131;
11. Crammer's portrait of the Lunacy Commssion as an almost toothless body which ‘claimed the right to inspect plans and rules beforehand, and to offer advice on the best way to do things, but [which] could not enforce anything’ (:106) is sharply at variance with the picture that emerges from the work of the two scholars who have completed the most systematic examinations of its operations and influence. Cf. Nicholas Hervey, ‘The Lunacy Commission’
12. D. J. Mellett, The Prerogative of Asylumdom: Social, Cultural, and Administrative Aspects of the Treatment of the Insane in Nineteenth Century Britain (New York: Garland, 1982)
13. idem, ‘Bureaucracy and mental illness: the Commissioners in Lunacy 1845–90’, Medical History, xxv (1981), 221–250.
14. see The Most Solitary of Afflictions, 19–25,77- 115–32.
15. iota., 16–19, 51–6, 110–14.