Sarah Wise

Concerned that people with epilepsy may damage their heads while fitting, one enterprising asylum worker patented a reinforced hat (which could be worn by both male and female patients). This sketch of the bonnet was circulated in the medical press… Continue reading →

The Lunacy Law Reform Association meeting of 20 May 1874, in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, gets hijacked by a rather unsavoury subject:

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… Continue reading →

Adverts such as these were controversial as it was not easy to keep tabs on, and inspect the conditions of, “single-patient” lunatics, boarded in domestic premises. The Commissioners in Lunacy were keen to try to stamp out this type of… Continue reading →

When an English-language translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis arrived at the offices of The Journal of Mental Science for review in 1893, the good gentlemen doctors were horrified. (For more shock at ‘foul beastliness’, see my post on ‘Edwardian morality’… Continue reading →

It was a sad fact that some families would place a relative in a lunatic asylum and then neglect to visit them regularly; in some cases, contact ceased altogether as the years passed. I found this paragraph in a letter… Continue reading →

The superintendent of Gloucester County Asylum tabulated information on his epileptic patients in 1853 to see if any connection could be made. For the latest thinking on the subject go to http://www.epilepsy.com/node/998644    

The Journal of Mental Science printed this floorplan of the asylum of San Servolo in Venice, along with a key to its plan and a table of the conditions and the social background of patients being admitted. The table makes… Continue reading →

In his Pathology of Mind (1879) Henry Maudsley pondered (not triffically scientifically, it has to be said) why the “savage” nations of the earth appeared to suffer less insanity than the populations in the developed world. It’s a classic of… Continue reading →

Richard Dadd, artist, began to suffer delusions in 1843; his father, Robert, however, was reluctant to consign him to the care of doctors. Overruling advice from Dr Alexander Sutherland, who believed that Richard would be dangerous when certain hallucinations came… Continue reading →