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Historical Responses to Mental Illness
and Disability
This
sub-theme reflects the marked
international research strength in the
history of mental illness, disabilities
and psychiatry of a number of Centre
staff. It encompasses i) Andrews’
ongoing research on the history of
criminal lunacy, currently culminating
in articles and a research monograph
entitled The Incarceration and
Excarceration of Criminal Lunatics in
Victorian Britain (ca. 2009/10 – see
below). More broadly, it accommodates
his work on madness, melancholy and
institutional psychiatry in Britain
1600-2000. It also integrates ii)
van der Eijk’s and
Rütten’s ongoing
research on the history and iconography
of melancholy and the mind-body debate
in antiquity and beyond;
Boulton’s research on poor
relief in pre-Industrial England and the
disposal of the mentally
afflicted/disabled; and Eddy’s
current and future research on travel,
therapeutics and psychological health.
It additionally links with various PhD
projects within the Centre.
i)
Andrews’ broadly comparative
study of the criminally insane admitted
to Broadmoor Hospital, in Crowthorne,
Berkshire, and to Perth Criminal Lunatic
Dept. in Scotland, during ca. 1860-1914,
concentrates on particular categories of
offenders, especially sex offenders,
arsonists and child murderers, tracing
their passage to, interactions within
and exit from these institutions. This
research raises fundamental questions
about the changing social, legal and
medical influences on patients
continuing stay and discharge and on
official policies towards the criminally
insane. Additionally, considerable
insights have emerged on the
arrangements for guardianship of the
criminally insane post discharge and the
role of the community in its widest
sense in arbitrating their disposal.
This project elucidates how far the
criminally insane were being designated
as beyond the pale of society,
permanently banished from its midst, or
were vice versa being carefully and
considerately treated, ‘reformed’,
remoralised and relocated. It also
clarifies the changing definitions of
criminal insanity imposed on these
offenders by medical and legal
professionals, and the application of
particular diagnostic techniques.
ii)
Philip van der Eijk has
continued his work on ancient concepts
of melancholy. He has published widely
on classical (especially Hippocratic,
Aristotelian and Galenic) notions of
mental illness, including recent
contribution on the work of Aristotle
and melancholy (see bibliography). He
has contributed to a workshop on the
1st/2nd century CE Greek medical writer
Rufus of Ephesus, whose treatise On
Melancholy acquired great fame and was
of great influence on later conceptions
of melancholy in Greek medicine
(especially Galen) and in Arabic medical
thought. He has written two
contributions to the collection of
papers arising from this workshop:
‘Rufus On Melancholy and its
philosophical backgound’, and ‘Galen, On
Affected Places III.9–10: Greek,
English, Arabic’ (co-authored with P.
Pormann), both forthcoming in: P.
Pormann (ed.), Rufus on Melancholy,
Tübingen: Mohr – Siebeck, 2008. He has
further contributed to a conference on
‘Mirrors of melancholy’ held at the
University of Victoria in October 2007
and has written a chapter for the
conference proceedings on ‘Melancholia
and hypochondria – steps in the history
of a problematic combination’,
forthcoming in: H. Cazes, A.-F. Morand
(eds.), Miroirs de mélancolie, Lausanne
2008 (in press). He has also contributed
to a special issue of the Dutch
historical journal Groniek devoted to
the concept of melancholy in the late
medieval and early modern period: ‘De
priesters van de Muzen en de zwarte gal.
De Aristotelische achtergrond van het
melancholiebegrip in de vroeg-moderne
tijd’, in: Groniek 176, 2007, 263–275
Rütten has published
extensively, since the early 1990s, on
the classical
Hippocratic/pseudo-Hippocratic
construction of melancholy, including
recent published work on Democritus and
melancholy, and melancholy and
temperament.
Andrews is contributing to
Northumbria University’s public lecture
series on Before Depression’
(‘Diagnosing and Treating Melancholy in
Georgian England’, 12 May 2008), and to
a Glasgow CHM research seminar on ‘Using
Case Notes in the History of Medicine’
and an Edinburgh RCP conference on the
‘Edinburgh Royal Hospital and the
History of Scottish Psychiatry’.
Boulton’s research in this
field has included an examination of
early modern workhouse and private
madhouse provision for the insane in
specific London parishes. This research
group is further reflected in the PhD
projects (already, as of July 2008)
close to completion) of McDonald
(on the concept of phrenitis in
antiquity), Metzger (on
psychopathology and concepts of
demonical possession in late antiquity
and the early Byzantine period, Wellcome
funded) and Hulskamp
(on dreams and nightmares in ancient
medicine, Wellcome funded).
Centrally
and crucially, this sub-theme
incorporates two new collaborative
projects: (a) ‘Therapeutics of
Travel’/’Trajectories of Mental
Invalidism’ and b) ‘Madness and Death in
Western Civilisation’(see below). A
range of public engagement activities
(c) are also associated with this
research group.
a) A range
of individual and collaborative work is
being undertaken on aspects of the
relationship between travel and
medicine. Andrews, Eddy
and Rütten have already
written and/or published significant
contributions to this field, focusing in
particular on travel-oriented
pathologies/therapies for the mentally
afflicted (Andrews),
travelling physicians, medical travel
literature, the classification and
commodification of spa water
(Eddy), and Thomas Mann,
cholera and medicine (Rütten).
This work is being extended into
articles/chapters, to form (alongside
other commissioned articles) a
collection provisionally entitled ‘The
Therapeutics of Travel: Prosecuting,
Prescribing and Policing Salutary Travel
in an Age of Health Tourism in Europe
ca. 1700-1900’. Focusing on the meaning
and justifications for putatively
salutary travel for the mentally,
nervously and physically afflicted, this
collection will foreground analysis of
both local and supra-national factors
affecting travel. Eddy’s
work under this head focuses on
Scottish-trained physicians and surgeons
travelling in India and Australia,
namely, Dr Robert Brown, one of the
first British travellers to Australia,
and Francis Hamilton Buchanan, an East
India Company surgeon, botanist and
travel writer. This research will
address these practitioners’ therapeutic
motivations for collecting colonial
materia medica specimens; the
explanatory models of health introduced
on travellers’ return to Britain and
associated with these specimens; and why
particular drugs were ascribed
differential conduciveness in British
theories of health. A special focus is
the role played by travellers themselves
in this pharmaceutical integration
process. An additional concern of this
research is how travelling physicians
viewed medical philology and its
positive or negative impact on the mind.
Although advanced literate/linguistic
abilities were often identified by
travelling practitioners as key in
mediating mental stability and
facilitating moral therapy, how this
played out in colonial contexts has been
substantially neglected by scholars.
Andrews’ research
(‘Trajectories of Mental Invalidism:
1650-1850’), concentrates on British
nervous, hypochondriacal and mental
invalids, but also covers travel/travel
advice regarding selected health resorts
in Europe and the colonies. It focuses
on the narratives of the elite and
middling sort who travelled for the sake
of their nerves/minds, setting its
findings against the context of a
burgeoning medical and lay literature
concerned with invalidism, health
consumerism and health tourism. Mapping
specific typologies, geographies and
topographies of travel associated with
mental health/disorder, and the changing
motivations and meanings behind such
travel, the research examines specific
sites and types of travel for nervous
and mental invalids, from country
sojourns to seaside resorts/sea
bathing/sea voyages to spa resorts.
b) Another central
strand of this research theme
concentrates on the history of madness
and death. Historians of psychiatry have
tended to be preoccupied with changing
notions of the causes, symptoms and
treatment of mental illness, with asylum
admission/discharge, psychiatric careers
and professionalisation, and with birth
and madness (rather than with death and
madness). Although a significant
proportion of those with mental
afflictions did not recover and died
whilst insane, historians have little
explored how past societies understood
or coped with the deaths of the insane.
In antiquity, madness was often seen to
presage death, and to adversely affect
longevity; similar views were carried
through to the early modern period,
though some argued contrarily that
madness might prolong life. Rather than
offering an epidemiological survey, this
research assesses medical, philosophical
and wider societal commentary on the
relationship between death and madness
in western civilisations. It also
addresses how the dying and deaths of
the mentally afflicted in different
historical and locational contexts were
mediated by families and other lay or
medical actors, and how (far) the bodies
and spirits of the insane were laid to
rest. The main outcome of this research
will entail a volume/special journal
edited by Andrews on
familial and medical mediation of the
deaths of criminal lunatics, and
Boulton on the disposal and
burial of lunatic paupers in London
parishes (cf. Boulton
2000), and provisionally entitled ‘The
Final Gateway: Madness and Death in
Western Civilisation’. |
