Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the 'truth' of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain.

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.

Received an Honourable Mention in the 2019 European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Book Awards Explores the asylum beyond simply an institution of socio-demographic interest, but also as an experimental space Brings together the history of psychiatry with the history of the body by examining the ways in which the body was investigated within the asylum Utilises an innovative structure mirroring the contemporary process of dissection in the asylum to explore everyday psychiatric practices Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Jennifer Wallis is Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London, UK, where she teaches courses on the history of psychiatry, the body, and nineteenth-century Britain. Her work has previously been published in History of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, among others.

Klappentext

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the 'truth' of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain.

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Skin.- Chapter 3: Muscle.- Chapter 4: Bone.- Chapter 5: Brain.- Chapter 6: Fluid.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.- Appendix: Demographic characteristics of West Riding Lunatic Asylum admissions. <p