HST5314

MADNESS AND MEDICINE IN MODERN

BRITAIN

2010

COURSE OUTLINE

Henry Clarke, West Riding Lunatic Asylum, c. 1869

Course Organizer

Dr Rhodri Hayward
r.hayward@qmul.ac.uk

G.25b Arts
 HST5314 Madness and Medicine in Modern Britain

Introduction

The discipline of psychiatry is foundational to our understanding of a wide

range of modern concepts from personality and responsibility through to
illness and deviancy. Our sense of our own identities, our motivations and
our patterns of behaviour, is drawn from modern psychiatric ideas. This
course provides a broad overview of psychiatric practice in Britain from the
beginning of state-regulated asylums through to the advent of current policies
of pharmaceutical treatment and community care. Using a mixture of
secondary sources and primary texts, we will examine how the diagnosis and
treatment of madness has been shaped through the rich interaction of social,
scientific, political, economic and cultural factors.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students should be able to demonstrate:

1. A clear idea of the evolution of psychiatric policy and practice in

nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.
2. A broad understanding of some of the political, social and economic
factors that have influenced medical ideas of madness.
3. Their insight into the reasons behind the dramatic growth and
subsequent decline of the asylum in Britain.
4. Some critical engagement with current debates over the status of
psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
5. Skill in the interrogation of a wide range of primary material from
nineteenth-century medical textbooks and patient narratives through
to twentieth-century case histories, policy documents and radical
critiques of psychiatry.
6. The analytical skills to question many of the assumptions inherent in
different approaches to the history of psychiatry
7. The ability to defend their own position and perspective on the history
of psychiatry

Assessment

1. One 4000 word essay due in Monday 22 March (45%)

2. Two hour examination (45%)
3. Continuous assessment of seminar performance (10%)

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 Teaching and Resources

HST5314 is taught through weekly lectures and seminars. Attendance at both lectures and
seminars is compulsory

Lectures will provide a broad overview of the major historical developments and the
respective position of different historians on the significance of these events.

Seminars will involve review and discussion of the lecture and set texts. These sessions will
be student led. Two designated leaders will be nominated for each week but every student is
expected to participate in the discussion and every student should attempt to read as widely as
possible around the week’s topic and prepare questions to bring to the seminar.

Seminars provide an open discussion forum. They should not be seen as a humiliating trial or
as some kind of test of your knowledge. They provide an opportunity to clarify your ideas
and arguments ahead of the essay and the exam.

The success of any seminar depends upon your participation. It is important that you ask
questions now matter how silly or confused you may think they are. Seminars are one of the
few times in your life when you will be able to talk at great length about your ideas to a
receptive audience. Make the most of it. Your seminar contribution will now form part of
your overall assessment.

The usual college rules apply – students missing three seminars will normally be deregistered
unless they can prove extenuating circumstances.

The key to success in this course is background reading. The course packs and websites
provide a guide to material but much more is available – esp. through the Wellcome Library
and through electronic databases such as Google Book Search. Demonstrating your
familiarity with this broad literature in your essays and examination answers will be well
rewarded.

Library Resources

Although Queen Mary University Library has a good range of secondary works on the history
of psychiatry, a far broader range of materials including archives and primary texts is
available at the Wellcome Library at 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.

You should all attempt to join the Wellcome Library at the first opportunity. Details of the
library can be found on the following webpage: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/

I will try to arrange introductory visits during the first fortnight of the course.

A large number of medical journals are available on free access via PubMed – including
Medical History. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pmc

3
 Core Reading

The following all provide ‘affordable’ core reading material for the course. Porter’s short
books provide witty and accessible introductions; Showalter develops an important feminist
perspective and Taylor and Shuttleworth’s volume provides a useful collection of primary
texts. Scull and Shorter’s volumes may be regarded as essential course books and should be
purchased if you are feeling flush – they’re about £15 each.

Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness [1987], London: Phoenix, 1999.
Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Age of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac,
New York: John Wiley, 1997.
Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980,
London: Virago, 1987.
Jenny Bourne Taylor & Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological
Texts, 1830-1890, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
Edward Shorter, A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry, New York: Oxford University Press,
2005. QM: RC438 SHO – provides a useful point of reference.

Websites should be used with care since the history of psychiatry is rather contested subject.
Three useful sites for background information are:

http://sites.google.com/site/psychiatryfootnotes/Introduction
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/MHHTim.htm
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/specialtytraining/students/historyofpsychiatry.aspx

Course Programme

15 January Introduction: Writing the History of Madness

22 January The Legal Origins of Psychiatry
29 January Psychiatry and the Asylum
5 February Henry Maudsley and the Growth of Psychiatric Pessimism
12 February Women, Hysteria and the Politics of Diagnosis
19 February Neurasthenia and the Problem of Masturbation
26 February READING WEEK
5 March Freud, Hysteria and the Rise of Psychoanalysis
12 March Shellshock and the Rise of Psychotherapy
19 March Physical Methods of Treatment
26 March R. D. Laing and the Anti-Psychiatry Movement
2 April Decarceration and the Anti-Depressant Era

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15 January

WEEK ONE: INTRODUCTION AND ORIENTATIONS.

This seminar will introduce the broad outline of the course. Particular attention will be paid
to the some of the key organising concepts in modern psychiatry such as normality, deviance
and mental illness. How have our ideas of personality, individuality, illness and
responsibility changed over the last 200 years? What are the effects of these changes on
politics, religion and criminal justice? Can we justify our contemporary ideas about
personality and mental illness? Can we discern any kind of progress in our treatment of the
insane?

Readings

There are no set readings for the opening seminar, but it would useful if you could start on
some of the core readings and also try to look at one of the following short introductions:

• Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 493-
524. QM: R 131 POR
• Roy Porter, ‘Mental Illness’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of
Medicine, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 278-303. QM: R 131 POR
• Michael Neve, ‘Medicine and the Mind’, in Irvine Loudon (ed.), Western Medicine: An
Illustrated History (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 232-48. QM: R 131 LOU
• Mark Micale, ‘The Psychiatric Body’ in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds.)
Medicine in the Twentieth Century, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000, ch. 22. [on
order at QMUL]
• Jack Pressman, ‘Concepts of Mental Illness in the West’, in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The
Cambridge World History of Human Disease, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993, pp. 59-84. QM: R 131 KIP [oversize].

For overviews of the historiography, see:

• Andrew Scull, ‘A quarter century of the history of psychiatry’, Journal of the History of
Behavioral Sciences 35.3 (1999): 239-46. 
• Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby, ‘Introduction: Gender and Class in the
Historiography of British and Irish Psychiatry’, in Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.  [Open access on www.ingentaconnect.com]

Try to clarify your own ideas on the status and purpose of psychiatry. You might enjoy some
of the following films held in the University Library:

• The Madness of King George (1997), QM: PN1997 HYT/MAD

• The Snake Pit (1948). QM: PN1997 LIT6/SNA
• Shock Corridor (1963), QM: PN1997 FUL2/SHO
• The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) QM PN1997 WEI1/CAB
• The Cobweb (1955) QM: PN 1997 MIN4/COB
• Family Life (1971) QM: PN1997 LOA/FAM
• King and Country (1964) QM: PN1997 LOS/KIN
• Lilith (1964) QM: 1997 ROS14/LIL
• Mine Own Executioner (1947) QM: PN1997 KIM2/MIN
• The Night has Eyes (1942) QM: PN1997 ARL/NIG

5
22 January

WEEK 2: THE LEGAL ORIGINS OF PSYCHIATRY

The emergence of psychiatry in Britain is inextricably bound up with the modern legal
system. The image and expert status of the profession was, to a large extent, defined by the
use of the insanity defence in criminal trials. Mental illnesses are unique in being defined
through both medical and legal expertise

In this week’s seminar we will examine the evolution of the insanity defence by looking at the
case of Mary Ann Brough, a former royal wet nurse who in 1854 was found ‘not guilty by
reason of insanity’ after killing six of her children.

For useful overviews of the subject, see:

• Joel Eigen, ‘Delusion's Odyssey: Charting the Course of Victorian Forensic

Psychiatry’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27 (2004): 395-412. 
• Joel Eigen, ‘‘Lesion of the will: medical resolve and criminal responsibility in the
Victorian Era’, Law and Psychiatry Review 33.2 (1999): 425-60 
• Roger Smith, ‘Legal frameworks for psychiatry’, in G Berrios and H. Freeman (eds.),
150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991 vol. 1, London: Gaskell, 1991, pp.137-51
• Peter Bartlett, ‘Legal Madness in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine
14 (2001): 107-31 
• Henry Rollin, ‘Forensic psychiatry in England: A Retrospect’, in G Berrios and H.
Freeman (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991, vol II: The Aftermath,
London: Gaskell, 1996, pp. 243-67  Abridged electronic version available:
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/Online%20archive%2018%20Edward%20Oxford%20(
law%20and%20insanity).pdf

On the eighteenth-century background, see:

• Joel Eigen, Witnessing insanity: madness and mad-doctors in the English Court, New
Haven: Yale University Press, c1995. QM: KD7897 EIG
• Daniel N. Robinson, Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: the Insanity Defence from
Antiquity to Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1996. QM: K5077 ROB
• Joel Eigen, ‘I answer as a physician’: opinion as fact in pre-McNaughten insanity
trials’ in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (ed.) Legal Medicine in History,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, ch. 7. QM: K3601 LEG
• Roy Porter, Mind Forged Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the
Restoration to the Regency, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, ch. 3. QM RC438 POR

For the nineteenth-century context, see:

• Roger Smith, Trial by medicine: insanity and responsibility in Victorian Trials,

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, c1981. QM: KD7897 SMI
• Roger Smith, ‘The boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility in
nineteenth-century England’ in Andrew Scull (ed.) Madhouses, mad-doctors, and
madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the Victorian era, London: Athlone Press,
1981, pp. 363-384. QM: RC438 MAD
• Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England [2 vols] Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P.,
1968, 1973. Esp. volume 1 chs. 4 & 5. QM: KD7897 WAL
• Phil Fennell, Treatment without Consent: Law, Psychiatry and the Treatment of
Mentally Disordered People since 1845, London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
QM: KD3412 FEN

6
29 January

WEEK 3: PSYCHIATRY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a sudden and massive growth in the
numbers of public and private lunatic asylums. Why were such asylums established? What
role did they play in their local communities? Whose interests do they serve? What therapies
did they deploy? What was ‘moral management’? How effective were these new treatments?
How did they change the image of the mad?

Required Reading:

• Excerpts from Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat [1813], pp. 110-15, 
• Charles Dickens, ‘A Curious Dance around a Curious Tree’ Household Word 4 (17
January 1852):  http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=12156
• Roy Porter, ‘Madness and its institutions’ in Andrew Wear (ed.), Medicine in Society:
Historical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 277-301. QM:
RA418 MED

Please try to read:

• Anne Digby, ‘Moral Treatment at the Retreat, 1796-1846’, in William Bynum, Roy
Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of
Psychiatry vol. 2, London: Tavistock Publications, 1985, pp. 132-146. QM: RC 438
ANA. This essay provides an excellent guide to practice at the Retreat.
• Jonathan Andrews. ‘The Rise of the Asylum in Britain’, In: Deborah Brunton, ed.
Medicine Transformed; Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800-1939. Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 2004, pp. 298-330. RA418 MED

On moral management, see:

• Jenny Bourne Taylor & Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of

Psychological Texts, 1830-1890, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, section 4.1 ‘Moral
Management and the Rise of the Psychiatrist’. QM: BF103 EMB
• Anne Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat, Cambridge
University Press, 1985. QM: RC438 DIG
• Anne Digby, ‘Changes in the Asylum: The Case of York, 1777-1815’, Economic History
Review, 2nd series, 37 (1983), pp. 218-39. 
• Michael Donnelly, Managing the Mind: a study of medical psychology in early
nineteenth-century Britain, London: Tavistock, 1983. QM: RC438 DON
• William F. Bynum, ‘Rationales for Therapy in British Psychiatry, 1780-1835’, in Andrew
Scull (ed.) Madhouses, mad-doctors, and madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the
Victorian era, London: Athlone Press, 1981, pp. 35-57. QM: RC438 MAD
• Andrew Scull, ‘The Domestication of Madness’, Medical History 27 (1983): 233-48. 
• Vieda Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity, 1580-1890. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1979: ch. 4. QM: RC438 SKU
• Roy Porter, Mind Forged Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the
Restoration to the Regency, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, ch. 4 esp. pp. 206-228.
QM: RC438 POR
• L. D. Smith, ‘Behind Closed Doors: Lunatic Asylum Keepers, 1800-1860’, Social
History of Medicine 1 (1988), 301-27. 
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, London: Tavistock, 1967, esp. chs. 8 and 9.
QM: RC438 FOU. This remains a deeply provocative work.

7
On moral architecture, see:

• Barry Edgington, ‘The Design of Moral Architecture at the York Retreat’. Journal of
Design History 16.2 (2003): 103-117. 
• Barry Edgington, ‘Moral Architecture. The Influence of the York Retreat on Asylum
Design’, Health and Place 3.2 (1997): 91-99. 
• Andrew Scull, ‘A Convenient Place to Get Rid of Inconvenient People: The Victorian
Lunatic Asylum’, in A.D. King (ed.), Buildings and Society (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1974) QM: NA2543.S6 BUI. A revised version of this essay appears as
‘Moral architecture’ in Scull’s Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American
Psychiatry in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
ch.8  http://www.escholarship.org/

For a recent critical overview of the history of asylum building, see:

• Jo Melling, ‘Accommodating Madness: New Research in the Social History of Madness

and its Institutions’, in Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (eds.), Insanity, institutions, and
society, 1800-1914, London: Routledge, 1999. QM: RC450.G7 INS

Most of the current over the rise of the asylum has focused on the work of Andrew Scull, who
claimed that the sudden growth in asylum numbers was a result of industrial capitalism. For
Scull’s work, see:

• Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain,
1700-1900, New Haven: Yale U. P., 1993. QM: RC438 SCU
• Andrew Scull, 'Museums of madness' revisited’, Social History of Medicine. Vol. 6
(1993), pp. 3-23.
• Andrew Scull, ‘The domestication of madness’, Medical history 27 (1983), pp. 233-
48, repr. in Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American
Psychiatry in Historical Perspective, Berkeley: U. California P., 1989, pp. 54-79
QM: RC438 SCU ch.3  http://www.escholarship.org/
• Andrew Scull, ‘Psychiatrists and historical 'facts': Part two: Re-writing the history of
asylumdom’, History of Psychiatry 6, pt. 3:23 (Sep. 1995), pp. 387-94.
• Andrew Scull, ‘The social history of psychiatry in the Victorian era’, in A. Scull
(ed.), Madhouses, mad-doctors, and madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the
Victorian era, London: Athlone Press, 1981, pp. 5-32. QM: RC438 MAD

More revisionist accounts appear in:

• Bill Forsythe, Joseph Melling and Richard Adair, ‘The new Poor Law and the County
Pauper Lunatic Asylum: the Devon experience 1834-1884’, Social History of
Medicine 9, no. 3 (Dec. 1996), pp. 335-355. 
• Richard Adair, Bill Forsythe and Jo Melling, ‘A danger to the public? : Disposing of
pauper lunatics in late-Victorian and Edwardian England: Plympton St. Mary Union
and the Devon County Asylum, 1867-1914’, Medical History 42. 1 (1998), pp. 1-25

• Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, Insanity, institutions, and society, 1800-1914,
London: Routledge, 1999. [Essays by Wright, Smith and Bartlett]. QM: RC450.G7
• J. L. Crammer, ‘English Asylums and English doctors: where Scull is wrong’,
History of Psychiatry 5 (1994), pp. 103-15.
• Richard Adair, Bill Forsythe and Jo Melling, ‘Migration, family structure and pauper
lunacy in Victorian England: Admissions to the Devon County Pauper Lunatic
Asylum, 1845-1900’, Continuity and Change 12.3 (1997): 373-401.

8
Useful comparative work includes:

• John Walton, ‘Lunacy in the Industrial Revolution: a study of asylum admissions in

Lancashire, 1848-50’, Journal of Social History. 13 (1979-80), pp. 1-22 
• John Walton, ‘Casting out and bringing back in Victorian England: pauper Lunatics’
in William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of
Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry vol. 2, London: Tavistock Publications,
1985, pp. 132-146. QM: RC438 ANA
• Michael Ignatieff ‘Total institutions and working classes: a review essay’, History
Workshop Journal 15 (Spring 1983), pp. 167-73. 
• Laurence J. Ray, ‘Models of Madness in Victorian Asylum Practice’, Archives
europeenes de sociologie, 22 (1981), 229-64.
• Chris Philo, ‘Journey to the Asylum: a medical-geographical idea in historical
context’, Journal of Historical Geography 21.2 (1995): 148-68. 

On the philosophy of non-restraint

• Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: The Case of the
Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History 39 (1995), 1-17. 
• Camilla Haw and Graeme Yorston, ‘Thomas Prichard and the Non-Restraint
Movement at Northampton Asylum’, Psychiatric Bulletin 28.4 (2004): 140-42 
• Nancy Tomes, ‘The Great Restraint Controversy: A Comparative Perspective on
Anglo-American Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century’ in William Bynum, Roy
Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History
of Psychiatry vol. 3, London: Tavistock Publications, 1988, pp. 190-225. QM: RC438
ANA pp. 190-225.
• Constance M. McGovern, 'The Myths of Social Control and Custodial Oppression:
Patterns of Psychiatric Medicine in Late-Nineteenth-Century Institutions', Journal of
Social History, 20 (1986): 3-23. 
• Andrew Scull, ‘“A Brilliant Career?” John Conolly and Victorian Psychiatry’
Victorian Studies 27.2 (1984): 203-36  repr. in Scull, MacKenzie and Hervery,
Masters of Bedlam, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, ch. 3

For the Commissioners in Lunacy, see:

• Nicholas Hervey, ‘A Slavish Bowing Down’ in William Bynum, Roy Porter, and
Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of
Psychiatry vol. 2, London: Tavistock Publications, 1985, pp. 98-131.
• D. J. Mellett, ‘Bureaucracy and Mental Illness: the Commissioners in Lunacy, 1845-
90’, Medical History 25 (1981), 221-50. 

On ‘wrongful confinement’:

• J. J. Schwieso, ‘”Religious Fanaticism” and Wrongful Confinement in Victorian

England: The Affair of Louisa Nottidge’, Social History of Medicine, 9 (1996), 159-
74. 
• Peter McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy: The Victorians and Wrongful Confinement’,
Journal of Social History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Spring, 1978), pp. 366-386 
• Peter McCandless, “Dangerous to Themselves and Others: the Victorian Debate over
the Prevention of Wrongful Confinement”, Journal of British Studies 23.1 (1983):
84-104. 
• Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian
England, London: Virargo, 1989, chs. 5 and 6. QM: HQ193

9
5 February

WEEK 4: HENRY MAUDSLEY AND THE GROWTH OF PSYCHIATRIC

PESSIMISM

The sudden growth in asylum provision in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a
spectacular increase in the numbers of the certified insane. The reasons for this growth were
widely debated amongst Victorian commentators and are still disputed by modern historians.
Why did the numbers of the insane increase in the nineteenth century? What effect did this
have on the psychiatric profession? How did it shape popular and medical models of mental
disease?

Required Reading:

• Andrew Scull, ‘Was Insanity increasing’, in Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-

American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective, Berkeley: U. California P., 1989, pp. 239-
49.  www.escholarship.org An earlier version of this article appeared in the British
Journal of Psychiatry 144 (1984): 432-36.
• Henry Maudsley, ‘Is Insanity on the Increase?’, British Medical Journal 1 (13 January
1872): 36-9. 

See also:

• Andrew Scull, Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in
Britain, 1700-1900, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, ch. 7. QM: RC438 SCU
• [Andrew Wynter], ‘Lunacy on the Increase?’ [1857] repr. in Jenny Bourne Taylor &
Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-
1890, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998: 295-7. QM: BF103 EMB

For a critique of Scull’s thesis, see:

• E. Fuller Torrey, The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness, 1750 to the Present,
Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2003.  QM: E-Resource
• Edward Hare, ‘Was Insanity on the Increase?’, British Journal of Psychiatry 142 (1983):
439-55. 
• Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Age of the Asylum to the Age of
Prozac, New York: John Wiley, 1997: ch. 2, esp. 46-64. QM: RC 438 SHO

See also the literature on asylums listed under last week’s readings.

For Henry Maudsley, see:

• Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie, Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam : the

transformation of the mad-doctoring trade, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University
Press, c1996, ch. 6. QM: RC438 SCU
• Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture in
Britain, 1830-1980, London: Virago, 1987, ch. 4. QM: RC451.4.W6 SHO
• Trevor Turner, ‘Henry Maudsley: psychiatrist, philosopher and entrepreneur’, in
William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness:
Essays in the History of Psychiatry vol. 3, London: Tavistock Publications, 1988, pp.
151-89. QM: RC438 ANA (See also Turner’s entry on Maudsley in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography  Senate House).
• Michael Collie, Henry Maudsley: Victorian psychiatrist, a bibliographical study,
Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1988. [Wellcome].

10
The therapeutic failure of Victorian psychiatry led to a search for new models of mental
illness. The biological idea of hereditary degeneration justified the widespread psychiatric
pessimism and explained the continued growth in the population of the certified insane.
Where did the idea of degeneration originate? How did Victorian psychiatrists adopt it?
What practices and policies did it legitimate? What was its relation to class and social
structure? How did it change the role of the asylum?

On psychiatry and the rhetoric of degeneration, see:

• Daniel Pick, Faces of degeneration: a European disorder, c.1848-c.1918; Cambridge:

Cambridge U. P., 1989. QM: CB417 PIC
• J. Edward Chamberlain & Sander Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. QM: CB417 DEG
• Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Age of the Asylum to the Age of
Prozac, New York: John Wiley, 1997, ch. 3, esp. 93-99. QM: RC438 SHO
• Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, Oxford: OUP, 1991, pp. 264-292. QM: RC438 OPP
• Janet Saunders, ‘Quarantining the weak-minded: psychiatric definitions of degeneracy
and the late-Victorian asylum’, in William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd
(eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry vol. 3, London:
Tavistock Publications, 1988, pp. 273-96 [See also Margaret Thompson’s essay in the
same volume].
• William Bynum, ‘Alcoholism and Degeneration in 19th Century European Medicine and
Psychiatry’ British Journal of Addiction 79 (1984), pp. 59-70.

For contemporary representations of degeneration, see:

• Henry Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, London: Macmillan, 1895: 47-62. 

• Cesare Lombroso, ‘Atavism and Evolution’, Contemporary Review 68 (1895): 42-9. 
• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895). QM: PR5774.T4
• Max Nordau, Degeneration, London: Heinemann, 1913. QM: NX454.5.F5
• Michael Neve and Michael Jay, 1900s, London: Penguin, 1999: ch. 1. [A fine collection
of useful excerpts]. QM: D421 NIN.

11
For visual representations of the degenerate, see:

• Janet Browne, ‘Darwin and the Face of Madness’, in William Bynum, Roy Porter, and
Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry
1: People and Ideas, London: Tavistock Publications, 1985, pp. 151-65.
• Mark Jackson, 'Images of Deviance: Visual Representations of Mental Defectives in
Early Twentieth-Century Medical Texts', British Journal for the History of Science, 28
(1995), 319-37.
• Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane: A Cultural History of Madness and Art in the Western
World (New York: Wiley, 1982). QM: RC455.4.A77 GIL
Sander L. Gilman, Health and Illness: Images of Difference (London: Reaktion, 1995),
ch. 2 ‘Again Madness as a Test Case’, pp. 33-50. (Wellcome)
• Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS
(Cornell University Press, 1998): ch. 8. QM: RC455.4.A77 GIL

For the literary context of degeneration, see:

• William Greenslade, Degeneration, culture, and the novel, 1880-1940, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994). QM: PR888.D37 GRE
• Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1984), ch. 4.  Not in library but online version available, see:
http://www.flinders.edu.au/topics/Morton/Victorians/VS4_Degeneration.htm

For continental comparisons:

• Robert Nye,. Crime, madness, & politics in modern France: the medical concept of
national decline, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. QM: KAH6133
• Sander Gilman, ‘The mad man as artist: medicine, history and degenerate art’, Journal of
Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (Oct. 1985), pp. 575-97.

On eugenics, see:

• Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1995. QM: HQ751 KEV
• Geoffrey Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, Oxford: Blackwell, 1971. :QM:
DA566.7 SEA
• Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birth
Rate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1990). QM: HQ755.5.G7 SOL
• Mathew Thomson, ‘Sterilization, Segregation and Community Care: Ideology and
Solutions to the Problem of Mental Deficiency in Inter-War Europe’, History of
Psychiatry 3 (1992), 473-98. 
• Mathew Thomson, ‘British Intellectuals, Democracy and Mental Health in Mid-Century
Crisis’, in Christopher Lawrence and A. K. Mayer, Regenerating England, Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2000, pp. 231-50.  www.ingentaconnect.com

12
12 February

WEEK 5: WOMEN, HYSTERIA AND THE POLITICS OF DIAGNOSIS.

The idea of woman’s vulnerability to nervousness and insanity was widely propagated in
Victorian science and literature. In this seminar we will examine how nineteenth-century
models of femininity shaped the psychiatric understanding of mental disorder and hysteria.
How was hysteria linked to reproduction in Victorian medical theory? What were the
supposed differences between the male and female mind? How did Victorian alienists treat
mad women? What kinds of treatment did the theory of hysteria legitimate? How did women
react to the psychiatric understanding of hysteria?

Required Reading:

• Thomas S. Clouston, Mental Diseases, London: J. & A. Churchill, 1904, ‘Lecture XIV:
Uterine or Amenorrhoeal Insanity: Ovarian Insanity (‘Old Maid’s Insanity): Hysterical
Insanity’: 525-35. 
• Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Insanity’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1979-80), 157-
81, repr. in Andrew Scull (ed.) Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, London:
Athlone, 1981, pp. 313-36.

You should also try to read, Joan Busfield’s criticisms of Showalter’s thesis:

• Joan Busfield, ‘The female malady? Men, women, and madness in nineteenth-century
Britain’, Sociology, 28 (1994): 259-77.

For useful overviews of the historiography:

• Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby, ‘Introduction: Gender and Class in the
Historiography of British and Irish Psychiatry’, in Sex and Seclusion, Class and
Custody, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004
[Open access on: www.ingentaconnect.com]
• Nancy Tomes, ‘Feminist Histories of Psychiatry’, in Micale and Porter (eds.),
Discovering the History of Psychiatry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp.
348-83. QM: RC438 MIC

On women and madness, see:

• Joan Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental
Disorder Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. [on order]
• Anne Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, in Susan Mendes and Jane Rendall
(eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the
Nineteenth Century London and New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 192-20. QM:
HQ1075 SEX
• Jane E. Kromm, ‘The feminization of madness in visual representation’, Feminist
Studies 20 (1994): 507-535.  JSTOR
• Charlotte MacKenzie, ‘Women and Psychiatric Professionalization 1780-1914’, in
London Feminist History Collective (eds), The Sexual Dynamics of History (London:
Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 107-19.
• Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, ch. 6 ‘Mad Women’.
• Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness [1987], London: Phoenix, 1999, ch. 6 ‘Mad
Women’. QM: RC438 POR

13
 • Elaine and English Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, in Martha
Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, London: Methuen,
1972, pp. 38-44. QM: HQ1593 SUF
• Andrew Scull, ‘Dazeland’, in Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-
American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective, Berkeley: U. California P., 1989, pp.
267-79 QM: RC438 SCU ch. 11  http://www.escholarship.org/
• Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-
1980, London: Virago, 1987. QM: RC451.4.W6 SHO
• Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, London:
Picador, 1997. QM: RC 532 SHO
• Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, ch. 8: ‘Feminine Vulnerability’. QM:
RC438 MAD
• Vieda Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580-1890, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1979, ch. 6 ‘Feminity and Illness’, 77-97. QM: RC: 438 SKU
• Jenny Bourne Taylor & Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of
Psychological Texts, 1830-1890, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, sections 3.1 & 3.2
‘Defining Womanhood’ & ‘The Uterine Economy’. (A collection of excerpts from
primary sources). QM: BF103 EMB

On women’s madness in literature, see:

• Helen Small, ‘”In the Guise of Science”: Literature and the Rhetoric of 19th-Century
English Psychiatry’, History of the Human Sciences 7 (1994): 27-56.
• Helen Small, Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865,
Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. QM PR868.M46 SMA

The best overview of the recent(ish) work on the history of hysteria, is:

• Mark Micale, ‘Hysteria and its historiography: A review of past and present writings I’,
History of Science 27 (1989), pp. 223-61.
• Mark Micale, ‘Hysteria and its historiography: A review of past and present writings II’,
History of Science 27 (1989), pp. 319-51.
• Mark Micale, ‘Hysteria and its historiography: the future perspective’, History of
Psychiatry 1 (1990), pp. 33-24.

See also:

• Roy Porter, ‘The body and mind, the doctor and the patient: negotiating hysteria’ in
Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter, Hysteria
beyond Freud, Berkeley, Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, c1993, pp.
225-85. QM: RC532 HYS
• Mark Micale, ‘Hysteria Male/Hysteria Female: Reflections on Comparative Gender
Construction in Nineteenth Century France and Britain’, in Marina Benjamin (ed.)
Science and Sensibility: Essays in the History of Gender, Science and Medicine in
Nineteenth-Century Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. (Wellcome)
• Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, (Princeton:
Princeton U. P., 1995). QM: RC 532 MIC
• Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents, (Princeton:
Princeton U. P., 1998). QM: RC 532. For a literary and theoretical perspectives.
• O. Mosucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929,
Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1979.
• Edward Shorter 'Paralysis: the rise and fall of a "hysterical symptom"', J. Social History
19 (1986): 549-82. 

14
On hysteria as a strategy in psychiatric professionalisation:

• Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the
Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: CUP, 1987. QM: RC450.F8 and E-resource
• Jan Goldstein "The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late
Nineteenth-Century France." Journal of Modern History 54 (1982), pp. 209-239. 
• Hilary Marland, ‘Uterine Mischief’: W. S. Playfair and his neurotic patients’, in Marijke
Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter (eds), Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First
World War, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA:
Rodopi, 2001, pp. 117-139.  www.ingentaconnect.com

On puerperal insanity:

• Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain,

Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004.
• Hilary Marland ‘“Destined to a Perfect Recovery”: The Confinement of Puerperal
Insanity in the Nineteenth Century’, in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity,
Institutions and Society, 1800-1914 London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 137-
156. QM: RC450.G7 INS
• Hilary Marland, ‘Disappointment and Desolation: Women, Doctors and Interpretations of
Insanity in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Psychiatry 14 (2003): 303-20. 
• Nancy Theriot, ‘Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century Physicians and
"Puerperal Insanity”’, American Studies, 26 (1990), 69-88.

For background:

• Helen King, ‘Conversion Disorder and Hysteria’, in German Berrios and Roy Porter
(eds.), A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Disorders,
London: Athlone, 1996, ch. 17.
• Roy Porter, ‘Love, Sex, and Madness in Eighteenth-Century England’, Social Research,
53 (1986), 211-42.

15
19 February

WEEK 6: NEURASTHENIA AND THE PROBLEM OF MASTURBATION

A persistent theme in psychiatric discussions of degeneration was the problem of

masturbation. Why did masturbation become such a matter of concern for psychiatry? How
was a sinful practice transformed into a psychological disorder? What were the imagined
effects of masturbation? How was masturbation related to the problems of modern living?

• T. S. Clouston, Mental Diseases, London: J. & A. Churchill, 1904: Lecture XIV: Insanity
of Masturbation’ or Henry Maudsley, ‘Illustrations of a Variety of Insanity’, J. Mental
Science 14 (1868): 149-62. .
• Arthur Gilbert, ‘Masturbation and Insanity: Henry Maudsley and the Ideology of Sexual
Repression’, Albion 12 (1980): 268-82. 

On the history of masturbation, see:

• Alan Hunt, ‘The Great Masturbation Panic and the Discourses of Moral Regulation in
Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth Century Britain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8.4
(1998): 775-615. 
• H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., ‘The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of
Disease’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974): 234-48.
• Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Doctor, Patient, and Onanist Diseases in the Nineteenth Century’,
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 30 (1975): 217-34.
• Lesley Hall, ‘‘Forbidden by God, Despised by Man: Masturbation, Medical Warnings,
Moral Panic and Manhood in Great Britain, 1850-1950’, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, 2 (1991-92): 365-87. 
• Lesley Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991. QM: HQ28 H1
• E. B. Rosenman, ‘Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhea Panic’, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, 12.3 (2003): 365-87. 
• Robert H. Macdonald, ‘The Frightful Consequences of Onanism: Notes on the History of
a Delusion’, Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 423-31. 
• Vieda Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity, 1580-1890. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1979: 69-76. : LV 95 SKU.
• Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian
England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, ch. 5 esp. 158-65.
• R. P. Neuman, ‘Masturbation, Madness, and the Modern Concepts of Childhood and
Adolescence’, J. Social History 8 no. 3 (1975): 1-27. 
• Jenny Bourne Taylor & Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of
Psychological Texts, 1830-1890, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998: section 3.3 ‘Masculinity and
the Control of Sexuality’. (A collection of excerpts from primary sources). QM: BF103
EMB

For the notion of the spermatic economy, see:

• G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of

Sexuality,’ Feminist Studies 1 (1973): 45-74.
• Peter T. Cominos, ‘Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System’,
International Review of Social History 8 (1963): 18-48, 216-50.

16
On neurasthenia, see:

• Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds.), Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to
the First World War, [Clio Medica 63], Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002:
 www.ingentaconnect.com Essays by Neve, Sengoopta and Thomson
• Barbara Sicherman, ‘The uses of a diagnosis: Doctors, patients, and neurasthenia’,
Journal of the history of medicine and the allied sciences, 32 (1977): 33-54.
• Simon Wessley, ‘Neurasthenia and fatigue syndromes’, in Berrios, German and Porter,
Roy (eds), A history of clinical psychiatry: The origin and history of psychiatric
disorders, London: Athlone, 1995, pp. 509–32
• Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian
England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, ch. 3.
• Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness, New
York: Free Press, 1993, ch. 8.

On the Victorian invention of sexuality:

• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin
Books, 1998. QM: HQ12 FOU
• Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in
Britain, 1650-1950, New Haven: Yale U. P., 1995. QM: HQ18.67 POR
• Arnold Davidson, ‘Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality’, Critical Inquiry 14 (1987): 16-
48. 
• Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. 1. The Education of the Senses,
Oxford: OUP, 1984. QM: BF692 GAY For masturbation, see section 4.2: ‘A Profession
of Anxiety’.
• Lesley Hall, ‘”The English have Hot-Water Bottles”: The Morganatic Marriage between
Medicine and Sexology in Britain since William Acton’, in Roy Porter & Mikulas Teich
(eds.), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality
Cambridge: CUP, 1994, pp. 350-66. QM: HQ12 SEX
• Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930,
Chicago: Chicago U. P., 1997, esp. ch. 6, ‘Weaklings’. : GC 5800 MAC
• Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, Oxford: OUP, 1994. QM: HQ18.67
MAS
• Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830,
London: Routledge, 2000. QM: HQ18.67 MOR
• Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard U. P., 1990. QM: HQ1075 LAQ

For T. S. Clouston, see:

• Allan Beveridge, ‘Thomas Clouston and the Edinburgh School of Insanity’, in Berrios
and Freeman, 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991, London: Gaskell, 1991, pp.
359-88.

On Crichton-Browne, see:

• M. Neve and T. Turner, ‘What the Doctor Thought and Did: Sir James Crichton-Browne,
(1840-1938)’, Medical History 39 (1995): 399-432. 
• Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, Oxford: OUP, 1991: ch. 2. QM: RC438 OPP

17
5 March

WEEK 8: HYSTERIA AND THE RISE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

As the nineteenth century drew to its close, biological models of hysteria began to be replaced
by psychological explanations. The most famous propagandist for this position was Sigmund
Freud. In this seminar we will discuss the life of Freud, his clinical technique, his model of
hysteria and his theoretical contribution.

Required Reading:

• Sigmund Freud. ‘Fragment of An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ [1905], in James

Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud 7, London: The Hogarth Press, 1964, pp. 36-164. QM: BF173.F62 FRE. Try to
read as much as possible. If pressed just read, pp. 45-61, 75-81, 90-103, 147-64. An
abridgement of this case also appears in Peter Gay, The Freud Reader, London: Vintage,
1995, pp. 173-95. QM: BF173.F62 FRE

For short commentaries, see:

• Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane, London: Phoenix, 1999,
pp. 112-18, chs. 8, 10, 11. QM: RC438 POR
• Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-
1980, London: Virago, 1987, ch. 6 esp. 158-61. QM: RC451.4.W6 SHO

There is a massive literature on the origins of psychoanalysis. Useful studies include:

• Lisa Appiganesi and John Forrester,. Freud’s Women, London: Virago, 1992. [Chapters 3
and 5 (pp. 63-116 and 146-67 respectively) deal with hysterics.] QM: BF173.F62.Z5
APP
• Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O: a century of mystification, London:
Routledge, 1996. QM: BF173.F62.Z5 BOR
• C. Bernheimer and C. Kahane, In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, New York:
Columbia U. P., 1985. QM: BF173.F62.Z5 IN
• Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time, London: Dent, 1988. QM: BF173.F62.Z5
• D. Hunter, ‘Hysteria, psychoanalysis and feminism: the case of Anna O’, Feminist
Studies 9 (1983), pp. 464-83.
• William J. McGrath, Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis: the politics of hysteria, Ithaca
London: Cornell University Press, 1986.
• Sarah Koffman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, Ithaca: Cornell U.
P., 1985.

18
On the construction of cases from symptoms, see:

• Ralphael Samuel, ‘Reading the Signs: Fact Grubbbers and Mind Readers’ History
Workshop Journal 32 (1991), 88-109; 33 (1992), pp. 220-51.
• Carlo Ginzburg, 'Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method',
History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980), pp. 7-36.

On case notes in psychiatric practice:

• Akihito Suzuki, ‘Framing Psychiatric Subjectivity: Doctor, Patient and Record Keeping
at Bethlem in the Nineteenth Century’ in Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (eds.),
Insanity, Institutions, and Society, 1800-1914, London: Routledge, 1999. QM: RC450.G7
INS
• Jonathan Andrews, ‘Case Notes, Case Histories, and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity
at Gartnaval Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of
Medicine 11 (1998): 255-81.

19
12 March

WEEK 9: SHELL SHOCK AND THE RISE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY IN BRTAIN

The mass outbreak of ‘shell shock’ during World War One stands out as one of the great
‘psychiatric catastrophes’ to hit the British population. What was ‘shell shock’? Why did it
arise? What was different about the psychological experience of World War one? What
effects did shell shock have on the theories, image and organisation of British psychiatry?

Required Readings:

• Excerpts from Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock”,
London: HMSO, 1922, pp. 17-18, 55-58, 76-80, 88-91. 
• Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture in Britain,
1830-1980, London: Virago, 1987, ch. 7 ‘W. H. R. Rivers and the Doctrine of Shell
shock’. QM: RC451.4.W6 SHO

There is a vast literature on shellshock

• Ted Bogacz, ‘War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914-22: The Work of the
War Office Committee of enquiry into Shell-shock’, J. Contemporary History 24 (1989):
pp. 227-56. 
• Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War,
London: Reaktion, 1996, pp. 107-23. QM: D 639.M3 BOU
• Joanna Bourke, ‘Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-
shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland’, 1914-39’, J. Contemporary History 35
(2000): 57-69. 
• Roger Cooter, ‘Malingering in Modernity: Psychological Scripts and Adversarial
Encounters during the First World War’, in Cooter, Harrison and Sturdy (eds.) War,
Medicine and Modernity, Sutton: Stroud, 1998, pp. 125-48. [Wellcome]
• Eric T. Dean, ‘War and Psychiatry: Examining the Diffusion Theory in the Light of the
Insanity Defence in Post-World War I Britain’, History of Psychiatry 4 (1993), 61-82.
• Chris Feudtner, ‘Minds the Dead have Ravished’ History of Science 31 no. 4 (1992): 377-
420.
• Eric Leed, ‘Fateful memories: Industrialized war and traumatic neuroses’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 35 (2000): 85-100.
• Peter Leese, Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War,
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). QM: RC550 LEE.
• Ruth Leys, ‘Traumatic Cures: Shellshock, Janet and the Question of Memory’, Critical
Inquiry 20 (1994): 623-662 
• Tracy Loughran, ‘Evolution, regression and shell shock: emotion and instinct in theories
of the war neuroses, c. 1914-18’, Manchester Papers in Economic and Social History 58
(2007): 1-24.
 http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/history/research/manchesterpapers/
• Tracy Loughran, ‘Hysteria and neurasthenia in pre-1914 British medical discourses and
in histories of shell shock’, History of Psychiatry 19 (2008): 25-46. 
• Harold Merskey, ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Shell Shock: Clinical Section’ in
German Berrios and Roy Porter (eds.), A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and
History of Psychiatric Disorders, London: Athlone, 1996. Wellcome
• Harold Merskey, 'Shell-Shock', in Berrios and Freeman, 150 Years of British Psychiatry,
1841-1991, London: Gaskell, 1991, pp. 245-67.
• Ben Shephard, ‘”The Early Treatment of Mental Disorders”: R. G. Rows and Maghull,
1914-18’ in in G Berrios and H. Freeman (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-
1991 vol. 2., London: Athlone, 1996, pp. 434-64. :Wellcome

20
• Ben Shephard, ‘Shell-Shock’, in Hugh Freeman, A Century of Psychiatry, London:
Mosby-Wolfe, 1999: 33-40. QM:RC 438 FRE. Oversize.
• Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. : RC 550 SHE
• Martin Stone, ‘Shellshock and the Psychologists’, in Martin Stone, ‘Shellshock and the
Psychologists’, William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy
of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry vol. 2, London: Tavistock Publications,
1985: pp. 242-71.
• Jay Winter, ‘Shell-shock and the cultural history of the Great War’, Journal of
Contemporary History 35 (2000): 7-11. 
• Alan Young, W H R Rivers and the war neuroses’, Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences 35 (1999): 359-378. 
• Hans Binneveld, From Shellshock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military
Psychiatry, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997. QM: RC550 BIN

On Rivers, see:

• Richard Slobodin, Rivers, Stroud: Sutton, 1997. QM: RC328.6 SLO

You might enjoy reading:

• Pat Barker, Regeneration, London: Penguin Books, 1991. QM: PR6052.75 BAR
• Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, London:
Picador, 1997. : RC 532. For comparison with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Gulf
War Syndrome.

On Freudianism in Britain:

• Graham Richards, ‘Britain on the Couch: The Popularization of Psychoanalysis in Britain

1918-1940’, Science in Context 13(2) (Summer 2000): 183-230.
• Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Health and Culture, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), chs. 3 and 6.
• Laura Cameron and John Forrester, ‘“A nice type of English scientist”: Tansley and
Freud’ History Workshop Journal 48 (1999): 64-100.  See also D. Pick and L. Roper
(eds.), Dreams and History, London: Routledge, 2004, 199-236. QM: BF1078 DRE
• Robert Hinshelwood, 'Psychoanalysis in Britain: Points of Cultural Access, 1893-1918',
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995): 135-51.
 http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho/HinshPub/CultAccess.htm
• Susan Raitt, ‘Early British Psychoanalysis and the Medico-Psychological Clinic’, History
Workshop Journal 2004 58(1): 63-85 
• Dean Rapp, ‘The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912-
1919’, Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), pp. 217-43, 
• Dean Rapp, ‘The Reception of Freud by the British Press: General Interest and Literary
Magazines, 1920-25’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 24 (1988), pp.
191-207.

21
For the influence of psychotherapy on British psychiatry:

• Malcolm Pines, ‘The Development of the Psychodynamic Movement’, in G Berrios and

H. Freeman (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991 vol. 1, London: Gaskell,
1991, pp. 206-31.
• David Armstrong, The Political Anatomy of the Body, Cambridge: CUP, 1983.
• Edgar Jones, 'War and the Practice of Psychotherapy: The UK Experience 1939-60',
Medical History 48 (2004): 493-510. 

On the refusal of psycho-dynamic approaches, see:

• Michael Clark, ‘The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder’, in A.

Scull (ed.), Mad-Houses, Mad Doctors and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in
the Victorian Era, London: Athlone, 1981, pp. 81-101.
• Andrew Scull, ‘Focal Sepsis and Psychosis: The Career of Thomas Chivers Graves’, in
G. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry vol. II: The Aftermath,
London: Athlone, 1991, pp. 517-36.
• Trevor Turner, ‘James Crichton-Browne and the Anti-Psychoanalysts’, in Hugh Freeman
and German Berrios, 150 Years of British Psychiatry: Volume II: The Aftermath, London:
Athlone, 1996, pp. 144-55.

For general background

• Roy Porter, ‘Two Cheers for Psychiatry: The Social History of Mental Disorder in
Twentieth-Century Britain’, in G. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds.), 150 Years of British
Psychiatry vol. II: The Aftermath, London: Athlone, 1991, pp. 383-406

22
19 March

WEEK 10: PHYSICAL METHODS OF TREATMENT

British psychiatry fragmented after World War One. Psychotherapeutic approaches had made
little headway amongst the chronic population of the County asylums and were thus largely
relegated to the restricted world of private practice. In its place a new biological psychiatry
arose, promising new physical methods of treatment. What were these ‘heroic remedies’?
Why were they so popular? What ethical issues did they raise? How were they justified?

Required Readings:

• William Sargant, Battle for the Mind, London: Heinemann, 1957, ch. 3. 
• Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Age of the Asylum to the Age of
Prozac, New York: John Wiley, 1997, ch. 6.

For the debate over physical methods:

• Joel Braslow, ‘Therapeutics and the history of psychiatry’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 74 (2000): 794-802
• Andrew Scull, ‘Somatic treatments and the historiography of psychiatry’, History of
Psychiatry 5.1 (1994), pp. 1-13.
• H. Merskey, ‘Somatic treatments, ignorance, and the historiography of psychiatry’
History of Psychiatry 5.3, (1994), pp. 387-91.
• Andrew Scull, ‘Psychiatrists and historical 'facts': Part one: The historiography of somatic
treatments’, History of Psychiatry 6.2 (1995): 225-41

For the history of leucotomy, see:

• Eliot S. Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures: The rise and Decline of Psychosurgery
and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness,(New York: Basic Books, 1986.
• Jack Pressman, The Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the limits of medicine. Cambridge:
CUP, 1998.
• David Crossley, ‘The Introduction of Leucotomy: A British Case History’, History of
Psychiatry 4 (1993), pp. 553-64.
• German Berrios, 'Psychosurgery in Britain and Elsewhere: A Conceptual History', in G
Berrios and H. Freeman (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991 vol. 1,
London: Gaskell, 1991, pp. 180-96.

For the convulsive therapies, see:

• Niall McCrae, ‘“A violent thunderstorm”: Cardiazol treatment in British mental hospitals,
History of Psychiatry 17.1 (2006): 67-90. 
• Edward Shorter and David Healy, Shock Therapy: A History of Electro-convulsive
Treatment in Psychiatry, Chichester: John Wiley, 2007. RC485 SHO
• Hugh Freeman, A Century of Psychiatry, London: Mosby-Wolfe, 1999: chs. 4 and 6. .
RC 438 FRE. Oversize.
• German Berrios, ‘Early Electroconvulsive Therapy in Britain, France and Germany: A
Conceptual History’, in 150 Years of British Psychiatry II (London: Athlone, 1996): pp.
3-15.
• L. Hirschbein and S. Savananda, ‘History, power, and electricity: American popular
magazine accounts of electroconvulsive therapy, 1940-2005’, Journal of the History of
the Behavioral Sciences 44 (2008): 1-18. 

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For Sargant, see his autobiographical work:

• The Unquiet Mind: the autobiography of a physician in psychological medicine, London:

Heinemann, 1967.
• Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000, ch. 15 ‘Front Line
Psychiatry’. : RC 550 SHE
• Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago: Chicago U. P., 2000, ch. 6 .

For the medical context of psychiatric modernism, see:

• Christopher Lawrence, ‘Continuity in Crisis: medicine, 1914-45’ in W. F. Bynum (et al.),

The Western Medical Tradition: 1800-2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006, ch. 3.

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26 March

WEEK 11: R. D. LAING AND THE ANTI-PSYCHIATRY MOVEMENT

The anti-psychiatry movement rose to prominence during the cultural revolution of the
1960’s. What were Laing, Cooper and Szasz’s ideas? How were they influenced by
mainstream psychiatry? What were the political implications of their work? What was their
long-term impact on British mental health policy?

Core texts in anti-psychiatry, are:

• R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, [1965],
London: Penguin, 1990
• R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family, [1964], (London:
Tavistock, 1964) QM: HQ 728 LAI
• R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. BF173 LAI
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, London: Tavistock, 1967. QM: RC438
FOU.
• Erving Goffman, Asylums, New York: Anchor Books, 1961, QM: HV3004 GOF
• Ken Kesey, One flew over the cuckoo's nest: a novel, London: Calder and Boyars, 1972.
QM: P3561.E8 KES
• Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, New York: Harper and Row, 1973. QM:
R726.5 SZA

On the social and cultural context of the anti-psychiatry movement, see:

• Colin Jones, ‘Raising the Anti: Jan Foudraine, Ronald Laing and Anti-Psychiatry’,
Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands
(Amsterdam: Rodopi: 1998): pp. 284-293. See also the essays by Thomson and Andrews
in this volume.
• Nick Crossley, ‘R.D. Laing and the British anti-psychiatry movement: a socio-historical
analysis’, Social science and medicine. 47(1998): 877-889. 
• Digby Tantam, ‘The Anti-Psychiatry Movement’, in G Berrios and H. Freeman (eds.),
150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991 vol. 1, London: Gaskell, 1991, pp. 333-50.
• Excerpt from Adam Curtis ‘The Power of Nightmares’ (BBC) on the Rosenhan
experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqaptRYjhq4

Useful criticisms of anti-psychiatry appear in:

• Peter Sedgwick, Psycho-politics, London: Pluto Press, 1987.

• Peter Miller, ‘Critiques of Psychiatry and Critical Sociologies of Madness’, in P. Miller
and N. Rose (eds.), The Power of Psychiatry London: Polity Press, 1986, pp. 12-42.

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On Ronnie Laing, see

• Daniel Burston, The wing of madness: the life and work of R.D. Laing, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996
• Bob Mullan (ed.), R.D. Laing: creative destroyer, London : Cassell, [1997]
• Gavin Millar, R. D. Laing, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review, 2004.
• Rhodri Hayward, ‘Recovering R. D. Laing’, Metascience 16.3 (2007): 525-27 

On Mary Barnes, see:

• Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through
Madness, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
• Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture in Britain,
1830-1980, London: Virago, 1987, pp. 118-24. QM: RC451.4.W6 SHO
• Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness [1987], London: Phoenix, 1999, ch. 2, esp. pp.
120-24. QM: 438 POR

26
1 April

WEEK 12: THE ANTIDPRESSANT ERA AND THE END OF THE ASYLUM

In the 1980’s the age of the asylum drew to its close. Large-scale hospitalisation was
abandoned in favour of care in the community. Why was this policy adopted? What have
been its effects on the population of the mentally ill? How has it impacted upon the practice
of psychiatry? What has been the wider impact of care in the community?

Required Reading:

• Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, ‘Psychotropicana’, London Review of Books (11 July 2002):

 Reprinted in Mikkel Borch Jacobsen, Making Minds and Madness: From
Hysteria to Depression, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, ch. 11.

On the new psycho-pharmacology

• Christopher Callahan and German Berrios, Reinventing Depression: A History of the

Treatment of Depression in Primary Care, 1940-2004, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
• Edward Shorter, Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders, New
York: John Wiley, 2008.
• David Healy, The Anti-Depressant Era, Cambridge MA: Harvard U. P., 1997. QM:
RM332 HEA
• David Healy, ‘The Origin of Anti-depressants’, in Hugh Freeman, A Century of
Psychiatry, London: Mosby-Wolfe, 1999, pp. 169-73. QM: RC 438 FRE.
• David Healy, ‘Shaping the Intimate: Influences on the Experience of Everyday
Nerves', Social Studies of Science 34.2 (2004): 219-46. JSTOR 
• Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing risky individuals: the role of psychiatry in new regimes of
control’, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 3 (1998): 177-196. 
• H. Kutchins and S. A. Kirk, Making us Crazy. DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the
Creation of Mental Disorders, New York: Free Press, 1997. QM: RC469 KUT

On community care and its background, see:

• Peter Bartlett and David Wright (eds.), Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History
of Care in the Community, London: Athlone, 1999.
• Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds), Cultures of Psychiatry (Amsterdam
and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 221-40, esp. essays by Barham and Busfield.
• Joan Busfield, Managing Madness: Changing Ideas and Practice, (London:
Hutchinson, 1986): final chapter and conclusion.
• David Clark, The Story of Mental Hospital: Fulbourn, 1858-1983 see:
 http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/clark/index.html
• Joan Busfield, ‘Mental Illness’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds.), Medicine
in the Twentieth Century (2000), pp. 633-51.
• Liam Clarke, 'The Opening of Doors in British Mental Hospitals in the 1950s',
History of Psychiatry 4 (1993), 527-51.
• Kathleen ‘The Diminishing Mental Hospitals’, in Hugh Freeman, A Century of
Psychiatry, London: Mosby-Wolfe, 1999: 191-94. QM: RC438 FRE
• Andrew Scull, Decarceration, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Polity, 1984. QM: KAH9275
• Andrew Scull, Social Disorder/Mental Disorder, London: Routledge, 1989, ch. 13
 http://www.escholarship.org/

27
ESSAY QUESTIONS

1. Why did the British state start to sponsor the construction of asylums?
2. What was the ‘moral treatment’? How was it related to rise of the asylum?
3. Explain the rapid growth of the Victorian asylum population.
4. Why did nineteenth-century alienists adopt degenerationist ideas.
5. Explain the rise and decline of the neurasthenia diagnosis.
6. Should we regard Victorian psychological medicine as a misogynistic institution?
7. How did Freud change our understanding of hysteria?
8. Was shellshock simply a form of malingering?
9. Assess the impact of the anti-psychiatry movement.
10. How has the new pharmacology changed the nature of psychiatry.

You are welcome to set your own essay question – but these will need to be cleared with me
by 5 March.

SUBMITTING YOUR ESSAY

1. Please submit paper and electronic copies of your essay.

2. Electronic copies must be submitted (via WebCT) by 4pm, Monday 22 March.
3. Paper copies should have a blue form cover attached and be submitted via the History
department essay box by 4pm, Monday 22 March.
4. Please notify the History Office if you have any difficulties submitting your essay.
5. Late assignments will be penalised. Five marks will be lost for each working day the essay
is overdue.
6. Extensions can only be arranged through the senior tutor.

SAMPLE EXAMINATION QUESTIONS

Answer two of the following:

1. Explain the sudden growth in asylum provision at the start of the nineteenth century.
2. What was the moral treatment and why was it eventually abandoned?
3. Why did psychiatric pessimism increase during the late Victorian period?
4. Should we see the psychiatric categories of hysteria and neurasthenia as simple
embodiments of Victorian values?
5. Outline the differences between the Freudian conception of hysteria and the model held
by British doctors between 1870 and 1914.
6. Should ‘shell-shock’ be regarded as a form of male hysteria?
7. Explain the growth of psychiatric optimism in the twentieth century.
8. Was the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960’s responsible for the later emergence of
‘community-care’?

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