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Book Reviews
| Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). ISBN10: 0-415-30174-2; ISBN13: 978-0-415-30174-9. Hardback, 278pp.
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| A substantial cache of primary source data from more than one psychiatric institution forms the basis of this study of insanity in England between the 1840s and the beginning of World War I. Placed within a wider historiographical context, the institutional records from the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Exminster, records of patient admissions to a smaller, fee-paying institution, Wonford House, and the patient admissions for two borough asylums in Devon, allow Melling and Forsythe to undertake a study of the 'politics' of mental breakdown in the period. Their themes in specific chapters include the administration of lunacy; treatment and care; admissions; community and family; gender and domesticity; patient backgrounds and class; and the patient experience. In a final chapter the authors reflect on the 'remaking' of the institutional landscape in the twentieth century. |
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This is an impressive volume, not least because it seeks to address a range of issues in one over-arching narrative of asylums and their social, political and cultural context. The authors introduce the complex debates surrounding the now extensive scholarship in the field of the asylum studies in a compact but detailed argument which situates their study. In seeking to understand the institution's role during the period, they set out to question previous assumptions, both scholarly and general, about a range of issues. In particular, the authors appear concerned to challenge leading scholar in the field, Andrew Scull, whose work is critiqued throughout the book. Here, Melling and Forsythe disagree that institutions imposed 'a hegemonic model of treatment' in specific places, and suggest instead that 'the identities of class, gender and ethnicity (or race) were negotiated via the rules of the asylum' (p. 6). |
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Australian and New Zealand readers of this book will find much to interest them, and many useful points of comparison with colonial psychiatric institutions in the same period. For instance, no Poor Law operated in the colonies, but as Melling and Forsythe suggest, the English institutions were progressively adopting what might be called a mixed-economy of asylum care over the nineteenth century; some families of inmates of public asylums were able to pay a small amount towards their maintenance, as happened in the colonies. A chapter about patient 'journeys' to the institutions in Devon also comments on migration, family networks and social change, and allows the authors to examine the demographic data in their extensive sample of cases. A similar approach to colonial patient populations is overdue. How friends and families coped with institutional committal is the subject of another chapter, and it too offers much to the scholarly field in different parts of the world. |
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One of the key shifts in the literature around the histories of institutional committal has been a focus on patients and their 'experiences,' insofar as these can be discovered. In this volume, which draws heavily upon statistical methods and provides rich insights into large-scale patterns, such questions of the 'private' histories of the insane are not forgotten. Families of the insane, the insane themselves, as well as the multiple relationships between these people and the various agencies that intersected over their institutionalisation, are all examined in this work. |
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Despite the foreword by Bernard Harris proclaiming this work as a milestone in its particular series, this book is one of the final titles in the Routledge series Studies in the Social History of Medicine, a publishing wing of the Society for the Social History of Medicine in the United Kingdom since 1989. The successful series has been taken up by another publisher in the UK; readers should hope that this has a long and productive association with the SSHM.
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| CATHARINE COLEBORNE
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| UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO |
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