Review of Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Benjamin Reiss

No abstract available.

Paul Maussire. On the need to isolate tuberculosis patients in insane asylums. Lion's thesis. 1902

The author's dissertation, which contains 62 pages, is divided into 3 chapters. The important practical significance of the issue to which this work is devoted gives me the right to present it in more or less detail.

Anna Ott, Economic Agent

The Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane was a significant economic enterprise whose daily workings generated immense income for the local community. Even while an asylum inmate, Ott remained a consumer of local businesses. The economies inside the asylum were highly tied to and interwoven with economic systems outside of the asylum. This chapter argues that nineteenth-century insane asylums altered communities. They became huge economic markets, provided goods to the local economy, created employment opportunities and also provided laborers, generated a demand for attorneys and new legal processes, and medicalized behaviors sometimes not previously considered pathological.

Through the Agency of Words: Women in the American Insane Asylum, 1842–1890

Between 1842 and 1890, 23 women wrote 33 memoirs about their time spent incarcerated in American insane asylums. While a handful of these memoirs have been studied, there has not been a recognition of how many asylum mem­oirs exist and their significance as a collective body of work. Grounded in an inductive analysis of the collective 33 works, this article begins a process of recovering a mostly forgotten moment in time when former patients took agency over their experience, ethos, and rhetoricity to break down the institutional wall of silence and give the public the first patient-centered memoirs. I argue that these women rhetors did this by foregrounding their own identity as patient and by creating a rhetorical position from which their readers would feel the trauma of asylum life. Both rhetorical moves countered institutionalization’s dehumanizing effects by placing the patient experience at the center of understanding the asy­lum experience.

Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure.

The Accursed Ills I Cannot Bear

Confederate veterans returned home, many of them broken physically and mentally, their manhood obliterated. They suffered from war trauma, but also from the humiliation of defeat, the destruction of the Confederacy, loss of their slaves, uncertainty about their future, financial ruin and political impotence. Many veterans, with physical and mental wounds, struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. Their identities as men had been undercut by war and defeat. This chapter traces the trek of southern veterans -- including former POWs, amputees, alcoholics, and addicts -- as they struggled to regain status in the home and in their communities. The most severe cases of veterans suffering the effects of war trauma entered insane asylums with symptoms today we know to be associated with PTSD: violence, paranoia, startle reflex, depression, anxiety, alcoholism or addiction, suicidal thoughts or behavior. Yet Southerners largely failed to grasp the causal link between mental illness and veterans’ military experiences. Struggling veterans exhibited social pathologies like marital conflict and the inability to hold a job. Suicide provided an exit from failure and suffering.

A Dark Doom to Dread

Women on the Confederate homefront, living in a war zone, suffered psychologically. Socialized to believe in doctrines of paternalism, many women were ill-equipped and unaccustomed to new wartime roles household head that the absence of men required of them. Many southern white women found the added demands of war unbearable and too demanding, leading some to succumb to mental illness that sometimes led to institutionalization in insane asylums, and suicidal ideation or behavior. The most vulnerable women on the homefront were young mothers and widows who bore the heaviest burdens when their husbands were gone leaving them to care for families under trying circumstances. Also contributing to the psychological ailments of Confederate women were worries about male relatives on the battle front, fear of invading armies, scarcity, financial duress, deaths of loved ones, and management of slave labor. The war also exacerbated conditions of women with postpartum disorders rendering them vulnerable to institutionalization or suicidal behavior. The chapter also compares women’s suicidal activity to mens’ and concludes that women more actively thought and talked about ending their lives than men, with relatively few ending their lives, whereas the suicidal behavior of men was more often lethal when compared to women.