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The nineteenth century was a period of considerable social, political, and economic change in Ireland, change that was demonstrated with particular force in relation to the care of the insane. This chapter seeks to examine some of the means through which the insane were re-figured in nineteenth-century Irish society, and looks in particular at popular conceptions of danger, the gender specificity or otherwise of insanity, and the question of celibacy as a precipitating factor in mental illness. The chapter seeks to engage with the ongoing debate in the history of psychiatry over the relative importance of gender as a factor in the admission, treatment, and discharge of the insane.
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"In the nineteenth century, the demographic development of the Meierij, a region in the south-east of the Netherlands, was different from that of the rest of modernizing northern Europe. Infant mortality remained high, while it dropped elsewhere. The article shows why the current explanation for high infant mortality, which links a sustained high infant mortality to a change in feeding habits is not valid. Increased fertility due, among other reasons, to a lower marital age offers a better explanation. Changes in economic options open to unmarried women provide the clue. With fewer premarital occupational possibilities, women would have been more inclined to marry, or there would have been less pressure on them to forestall a marriage in order to profit to the full from the occupational options. More and earlier marriages meant more children were born, and also a higher infant mortality rate."
Nineteenth-century Ireland was colonized and strictly controlled from Britain. In this highly regulated society, reports of the Inspectorate of Lunacy in Ireland were used to express an official medical view on cirminal lunacy. This view was based on experiences gained in the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum for Ireland, opened at Dundrum in 1820. This paper will examine some of the ideas expressed in these reports, including views on the treatment of criminal lunatics, on their potential for dangerous behaviour, and on emigration as a form of after-care.
Nineteenth-century medical literature often admonished the popular press to limit reports of suicide, because of a belief that knowledge of another's suicide could stimulate some persons to kill themselves. An 1837 case report (perhaps the earliest attempt at a psychological autopsy in an American medical journal) is discussed, because it presciently clarifies the concept of psychological sensitization. Its study leads to documentation of two examples of falsified death certificates. The power to prevent publicity of suicide by not reporting it may have diminished efforts for newspaper restraint, as did editorial resistance and later acceptance of Emile Durkheim's (1897/1951) strongly expressed belief that reports of suicide did not cause an overall increase in suicide. Despite lack of success over the past two centuries, efforts to keep reports of self-inflicted death confidential continue to flow from concern about suicidal contagion. Today, uncensored websites and books advocating suicide may limit the benefit of the U. S. Surgeon General's "call to action" to prevent suicide, which again supports voluntary media restraint in reporting suicide.
"The nineteenth century was not one of runaway health progress, but it marked a deep transformation of mortality conditions [in France]. The reconstitution of mortality tables by single years of age and calendar years makes it possible to study this transformation in detail, and to distinguish between period fluctuations and structural changes. In the present article, we have given preference to graphic representation, and purposely limited the statistics.... We have also given preference to the period approach." Consideration is given to annual mortality trends, life expectancy, age-specific probability of dying, the war-related crisis years of 1813, 1871, and 1915, and differentials in mortality by sex. Data generally concern the period 1806-1898.
The traditional view of nineteenth-century nursing in Holland is anything but bright. The abominable conditions in hospitals and suchlike institutions, the incompetence of the lay staff recruited from the lower strata of society are invariably emphasised. Slight improvements are only first noticeable at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly by the efforts of the deaconess' movement and pioneers like Florence Nightingale. This is a one-sided view. In Catholic circles it was already in the first half of the nineteenth century that Dutch women's congregations fell back on the Christian charitable traditions of care for the elderly, the orphaned and the infirm, and of nursing the sick. The way in which women religious realised this was an example and a model for the reorganisation of nursing: the self-denying efforts of 'women of good breeding' cooperating with the doctors made it possible for nineteenth-century hospitals to develop into centres of medical care.
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During the late nineteenth century a number of physicians, sometimes called inebriety specialists, combined a narrowly physicalistic disease concept of alcoholism with a high regard for the curative power of asylum treatment to advocate the development of specialized asylums for the treatment of alcoholism. Central to the idea of such an inebriate asylum was the belief that the power to detain the alcoholic was necessary to cure his disease. This article considers why inebriety specialists held this belief as well as why others opposed it. It also describes alternative approaches to alcoholism and the fate of efforts, during this period, to treat the alcoholic by confining him.
Nineteenth-century somatic theories of madness required specific types of treatment that focused on the body of the afflicted. This treatment stressed the primacy of caring for the body as a route to curing the mind. Treatment through environment would facilitate a transfer of the salubrious nature of a well-ordered place of treatment to the body and the mind of the lunatic. Therefore, the design of this environment became important as a method of treatment. The architect was to construct a facility ensuring the ordering, in detail, of placement, movement, and perception of the incarcerated. Also, this facility would act as a technology to facilitate the limits and types of bodily activities that would define a person as mad or sane. This article focuses on the architectural discourse of building for sanity.
In early nineteenth-century Britain the use of pictures in introducing novices to the study of science was contentious, leading to debates over the ways in which words and images constituted knowledge and over the role of pleasure in intellectual pursuits. While recent studies have stressed visual representation as a critical element of science and considered its relation to the written word in conveying information, this essay explores the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the mind and mental faculties in relation to corporeal responses to explain concerns over the role of images and the process of recognition. By considering illustration in this way, it argues that popular botany was defined by many expert naturalists as the means by which private individuals could best be encouraged to extend their aesthetic appreciation and love of plants to an active and participatory pursuit of science.
This essay reexamines the nineteenth-century origins of medical specialization. It suggests that by the 1880s, specialization had become perceived as a necessity of medical science as a result of the realization of two preconditions: First, a new collective desire to expand medical knowledge prompted clinical researchers to specialize; only specialization, it was believed, permitted the rigorous observation of many cases. Second, administrative rationality suggested that one could best manage large populations through proper classification, gathering together individuals belonging to the same class and separating those belonging to different categories. Both of these conditions emerged first and most powerfully in early nineteenth-century Paris. They were, in contrast, uniquely underdeveloped in the fragmented medical community of London during this period.
In the nineteenth century legislation concerning health care in Greece did not differ from that in the Netherlands, derived as it was from the French example in both cases. This article contains a comparison of the organisation and the effects of (public) health care in the Dutch city of Groningen and the Greek city of Piraeus, cities which in the course of the nineteenth century reached about the same size. It shows that on the local level, in spite of the convergence in national legislation, there were large differences in the way (public) health care was distributed and in the acceptation by the public. This was for example reflected in different death ratios.
The contemporary practice of involuntary commitment to psychiatric institutions of individuals diagnosed as mentally ill is based upon practices established by psychiatrists in the nineteenth century. The justifications given by nineteenth-century German-speaking psychiatrists for involuntary commitment are considered. An examination of sixty-seven texts by German-speaking psychiatrists reveals that involuntary commitment was justified more often as benefiting the mentally ill individual than as benefiting society. Justification for involuntary commitment was made somewhat more frequently during the second part of the nineteenth century than during the first part.
The monthly distribution of births for Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land, during the period 1839-1859 is examined. Prior research on two rural registration districts in nineteenth-century Tasmania revealed patterns of birth seasonality. The pattern was responsive to both the distinctive seasonal rhythm of regional economic activities and the birth interval and differed from the pattern for all of Tasmania in the twentieth century. Here, I argue that the aggregate monthly pattern of births in a mid-nineteenth-century urban registration district was, by contrast, not seasonal. Some seasonality was found among farmers, seamen, and dealers in foodstuffs but not in other industry groups. Class differences were not apparent. The research establishes that the seasonal distribution of mid-nineteenth-century urban births corresponds neither to nineteenth-century rural patterns nor to the patterns evident in the twentieth century.