“Like Spiders’ Webs for Flies”: False Confinement in Nineteenth-Century English Asylums
Grow, Samantha Marie
Honors Thesis, Emory University (2010)
Abstract
Books and newspapers in nineteenth-century England portrayed false confinement as an immense and widespread problem which caused a great deal of concern. Public panics led to preventative legislation, but still the protest groups spoke out. Was false confinement truly a problem, or was it blown out of proportion? If it was not a problem, what does this then say about the “anti-psychiatry” movement in history?
I will use contemporary labels, with a few exceptions. There were, at the time of my case study, 1838, no “psychiatrists”. There were “persons who make this Branch of Medicine their particular Study”2; these persons tended to be medical practitioners who happened to deal with mad-people, otherwise called mad-doctors. “Alienists” were the same, but this term, along with “psychiatry”, was not in use until the latter half of the century. For the sake of brevity I shall use these terms as there was in fact little to no difference between a mad-doctor in 1790 and an alienist in 1870. Lunatics shall be referred to as such because by this period the term had become generalized to mean any mad person. Both sane and insane had also entered the vernacular and shall be applied appropriately.
Click here to read this article from Emory University
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