These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: The origins of insane asylums in England during the 19th century: a brief sociological review.
    Author: Symonds B.
    Journal: J Adv Nurs; 1995 Jul; 22(1):94-100. PubMed ID: 7560542.
    Abstract:
    This paper explores the origins of insane asylums in 19th century England by comparing the official 'received' medically dominated perspective with an alternative sociological perspective. The major structural changes in provision are addressed as the focus for analysing the differing histories. A brief review is presented of the responses to insane people prior to the national asylum programme following the 1845 Lunacy Act, and of the reform logic that underpinned asylum care. The alternative sociological perspective presents the origins of psychiatric asylums as part of the social and economic changes occurring generally at that time. As such the origins of insane asylums are presented as part of a state-guided 'sanitary' movement which included poor, criminal and insane people within its remit. The effect of state-guided correction was the segregation of insane people from both the general population and other deviants who were formerly classed together. Insane people are thus presented as a group of deviants who departed most radically from the 'rational individualist' qualities of self-control, predictability and responsibility required in the industrialized world of capital social relations that emerged during the last century.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]