Sex and seclusion, class, and custody : perspectives on gender and class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry / edited by Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby.

Print version record.

Imprint from the publisher's Web site, viewed August 25, 2021.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

1. Introduction : gender and class in the historiography of British and Irish psychiatry / Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby -- 2. Class, gender and madness in eighteenth-century Scotland / Robert Allan Houston -- 3. Gender and insanity in nineteenth-century Ireland / Oonagh Walsh -- 4. Class, gender and insanity in nineteenth-century Wales / Pamela Michael -- 5. 'Embarrassed circumstances' : gender, poverty, and insanity in the West Riding of England in the early-Victorian years / Marjorie Levine-Clark -- 6. Delusions of gender? : lay identification and clinical diagnosis of insanity in Victorian England / David Wright -- 7. Sex and sensibility in cultural history : the English governess and the lunatic asylum, 1845-1914 / Joseph Melling -- 8. female patient : experience in two late-nineteenth-century Surrey asylums / Anne Shepherd -- 9. class apart? Admissions to the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum 1890-1910 / Lorraine Walsh -- 10. 'A menace to the good of society' : class, fertility, and the feeble-minded in Edwardian England / Mark Jackson -- 11. Class and gender in twentieth-century British psychiatry : shell-shock and psychopathic disorder / Joan Busfield.

"This collection of essays employs historical and sociological approaches to provide important case studies of asylums, psychiatry and mental illness in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Leading scholars in the field working on a variety of geographical, temporal, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts, show how class and gender have historically affected and conditioned the thinking, language, and processes according to which society identified and responded to the mentally ill. Contributors to this volume focus on both class and gender and thus are able to explore their interaction, whereas previous publications addressed class or gender incidentally, partially, or in isolation. By adopting this dual focus as its unifying theme, the volume is able to supply new insights into such interesting topics as patient careers, the relationship between lay and professional knowledge of insanity, the boundaries of professional power, and the creation of psychiatric knowledge. Particularly useful to student readers (and to those new to the academic field) is a substantive and accessible introduction to existing scholarship in the field, which signposts the ways in which this collection challenges, adjusts and extends previous perspectives."--Jacket

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