Main description:

Michel Foucault's seminal Madness and Civilization (1971) pioneered the history of madness as a subject for study. Medical historians have responded with studies of doctors, institutions and treatments. This four-volume edition adds patients' voices to the discourse. It draws together unpublished writings by inmates of nineteenth-century British asylums, including case reports, patient-written publications, letters and memoirs of asylum life. The collection reveals a diverse selection of patient voices offering an immediate engagement with insanity and asylum life. Sources shed light on the attitudes of society to insanity; on the medical practices involved in diagnosing, running and administering an asylum; and on what being defined as insane and/or experiencing insanity was like. The collection thus offers a rare glimpse into immediate reflections upon the experience of madness and incarceration.

Contents:

Volume 1 Asylum Case Records: the Official Record Selected case records from Royal Edinburgh Asylum; Crichton Royal-Dumfries; York Retreat; Broadmoor; Lancaster Moor; Exe Vale Hospital; Hanwell Asylum; Ticehurst Hospital; and Ballamona Isle of Man. Selections are made to represent different class, gender, types of illness and varied durations of stay. Volume 2 Patients' News: Asylum Newspapers A selection of in-house newspapers and magazines produced by nineteeth-century asylum patients. There is a strong representation from Scotland as many English asylums did not introduce patient-written publications until the twentieth century. Where possible individual newspapers will be reproduced in full. Under the Dome, Bethlem; Morningside Mirror, Royal Edinburgh Asylum; Gartnavel Gazette, Gartnavel Asylum; The Sunnyside Chronicle, Montrose; The New Moon, The Crichton Royal Volume 3: Voices from the Asylum Patients' Letters and Writings A selection of patient letters from Broadmoor; York Retreat; Royal Edinburgh Asylum and Colney Hatch. Letters are reproduced in full and selections are made to represent differences in class, gender and types of illness. Volume 4 After the Asylum: Patients' Writing Back Urbane Metcalfe, The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital (1818); E A Smythe, Recent Case of infamous and horrible abduction in London: being the full account ... of the imprisonment in a private mad-house of an American lady by her husband Carmichael Smyth, Esq., etc (1823); Jonathan Martin, The Life of Jonathan Martin of Darlington, Tanner, Written by Himself (1828); Anon, Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer: Being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum (1855); By a Late Inmate of the Glasgow Royal Asylum for Lunatics at Gartnavel [James Frame], The Philosophy of Insanity (1860); Ellen Naish Capper, critique of her stay at York Retreat (1876); Herman Merivale, My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum by a Sane Patient (1879); Clarinda Parry, How Pauper Lunatics are Made and Treated (c.1906); Marcia Hamilcar, Legally Dead. Experiences During Seventeen Weeks Detention in a Private Asylum (1910)