Category
Inconvenient People
Because I went well over my word-count, I had to delete the following passage from the penultimate chapter of Inconvenient People. The formidable singer, music teacher and lunacy-law campaigner Georgina Weldon got herself involved in the tragic story of Mrs… Continue reading →
Author Russell Croft has come to a different conclusion to mine regarding the soundness of mind of William Windham. In Inconvenient People, I briefly cover the “Windham Lunacy Commission” to illustrate how even the most bizarre and seemingly irrational behaviour… Continue reading →
I give Dr Maudsley (1835-1918) a bit of a hard time in Inconvenient People. He was famously inconsistent, and indeed believed that “consistency signifies prejudice and stagnation”; but by the 1880s, his views on women’s mental capacities had fossilised. He… Continue reading →
In the news for all the wrong reasons a few years ago, and the subject of Channel 4 docu-drama The Cure in 2019, Stafford General’s least important failing is its ugliness. It was built in the late 1970s and replaced… Continue reading →
Jean Charles Bucknill (pictured below), superintendent of the Devon County Asylum, found among his patients a woman admitted to the institution in 1859, with her lunacy certificate stating the evidence of her delusion: “She believes she is surrounded by robbers… Continue reading →
Throughout the nineteenth century, doctors and epidemiologists struggled to analyse the nature of syphilis, the course that it ran, its impact on an unborn child, and the disease’s relation to mental collapse. Not until 1910 were the mysteries solved. Syphilis… Continue reading →
Karl Marx interested himself in the care of the insane. In an article entitled “The Increase of Lunacy in Great Britain” for the New York Tribune of 20 August 1858, he stated that Britain had 37 public asylums, 15 hospitals… Continue reading →
Local historian and author Paul Lang contacted me to tell me about a fascinating museum at which he used to volunteer. Paul was the hospital librarian at St Bernard’s Hospital on the Southall-Hanwell border, at the very western edge of… Continue reading →
A huge number of male lunatics were admitted to asylums suffering from a condition that was understood in the 19th century as “general paralysis of the insane” (GPI). A very interesting piece on this condition, written by one Dr E… Continue reading →
It would be intriguing to know exactly how Baron Karl Andreas treated those who responded to his newspaper and magazine advertisements. Quack medicine was huge business in the 19th century, and “nervous” diseases were a highly lucrative market. Tweet