In their efforts to establish themselves as professionals, doctors of psychological medicine (they weren’t “psychiatrists” until late in the 19th century) became more and more insistent that anyone without qualifications should be pushed out of mental health care. By the 1850s, women who superintended private asylums were to find themselves increasingly excluded from being licensed to do so. This is the logic: women were forbidden to study for medical qualifications, therefore no woman was a doctor, and since only doctors should run asylums, no women could be asylum superintendents. The fact was, though, that many recoveries from mental illness happened either all by themselves without treatment; or came about as a result of being in a space where the patient was listened to and treated kindly – this was the famous “moral treatment” system, which was as successfully undertaken by lay people as by medical men. Thus the crackdown on women asylum licence-holders is likely to have seen off some much-needed helpers in the struggle to get people well again.

This is how the Journal of Mental Science reported on the changing licensing culture.