Loughran Cardiff History of Psychiatry Module

HS1745
MANAGING THE MIND

Psychiatry, Psychology, and British
Culture, 1800-2000
MODULE HANDBOOK
2010-11
Contents
Timetable p. 2
Contact details p. 3
Guide to Reading pp. 4-5
Teaching and learning methods p. 5
Assessment p. 6
Module overview, aims, and learning outcomes pp. 7-
8
Reading and seminar outlines pp. 9-
57
Essay questions p. 58
Specimen exam paper p. 59
Guidance on the historiographical essay p. 60
Dr. Tracey Loughran, Room 4.30

LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk
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TIMETABLE
SEMESTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Week 1 Wednesday 6 October Lecture Introduction
BLOCK 1: THE ASYLUM
Week 2 Wednesday 13 October Lecture Asylum: Rise, Expansion, Stagnation
Thursday 14 October Debate The Asylum: Success or Failure?
Week 3 Wednesday 20 October Lecture The Asylum as Curative Institution
Week 4 Wednesday 27 October Lecture Class, Gender, and the Asylum
Thursday 28 October Seminar Women and Madness
Week 5 Wednesday 3 November Visit Whitchurch
***READING WEEK***
BLOCK 2: VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Week 7 Wednesday 17 November Lecture Victorian Psychology
Thursday 18 November Seminar Phrenology
Week 8 Wednesday 24 November Seminar Mesmerism and Hypnosis
Week 9 Wednesday 1 December Lecture Degeneration
Thursday 2 December Seminar Crime and Psychiatry
Week 10 Wednesday 8 December Seminar Sexology
Week 11 Wednesday 15 December Lecture Uncovering Madness
Thursday 16 December Essay Workshop: Voices of Madness
SEMESTER 2
BLOCK 3: MODERN MADNESS
Week 1 Wednesday 2 February Lecture The Freudian Century
Thursday 3 February Seminar Psychoanalysis in Britain
Week 2 Wednesday 9 February Lecture Trauma and the First World War
Week 3 Wednesday 16 February Presentations Psychology, Psychiatry and WWI
Thursday 17 February Presentations Psychology, Psychiatry and WWI
Week 4 Wednesday 23 February Lecture Madness on Film
Wednesday 23 February Film The Seventh Veil
Week 5 Wednesday 1 March Lecture Psychology, Popular Culture, and WWII
Thursday 2 March Seminar Psychology, and Popular Culture
***READING WEEK***
BLOCK 4: MADNESS IN POST-1945 BRITAIN
Week 7 Wednesday 16 March Lecture Closing the Asylum
Week 8 Wednesday 23 March Lecture Anti-Psychiatry
Thursday 24 March Seminar Anti-Psychiatry
Week 9 Wednesday 30 March Seminar Care in the Community
Week 10 Wednesday 6 April Lecture End of a Century
Thursday 7 April Seminar Self-Help and Counselling Culture
Week 11 Wednesday 13 April Revision Workshop
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CONTACT DETAILS
• Contact details Room: 4.30

E-mail: LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone: (0)29 208 75650
• Teaching sessions Wednesdays, 9.00 – 9.50am, Room 4.43

Thursdays, 1.10 – 2.00pm, Room 4.43
There are usually sessions every Wednesday, and on alternate Thursdays. There are two exceptions to this
rule:
On Wednesday 3 November there will be no morning session, but there will be a trip to the Whitchurch
Hospital (previously the Cardiff City Mental Hospital) in the afternoon.
On Wednesday 23 February there will be a lecture in the morning session, followed by a film screening in
the afternoon. There will be no Thursday session in this week.
• Office hours Wednesdays, 10.00 – 11.00am

Thursdays, 3.00 – 4.00pm
These are the times at which I will be in my office, available to see students, every week. During term
time I am in work most other days (although remember that I do have other teaching commitments) and if
I am in my office, will be happy to see you. You are also welcome to make an appointment via e-mail to
see me at other times.
• Notification of absence
If you have to miss a teaching session, you must contact me to explain the reason, preferably in advance
and by e-mail. If you are absent without explanation from two out of three sessions, you will be reported
to the Senior Tutor. I am happy to provide copies of handouts or reading materials if absence from a
teaching session was unavoidable, but you must arrange to see me to collect this material (it will only be
provided by e-mail in exceptional circumstances). This is to ensure that you are aware of any important
information you may have missed, including arrangements for future teaching sessions, and to make sure
that the material is properly explained to you.
• How I will contact you
I will only contact students via their University e-mail addresses, and so it is vital that you check this e-
mail account regularly. I use this e-mail address because there are direct links to the class list for the entire
module on Blackboard, so it is by far the easiest way to keep in touch with students.
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GUIDE TO READING AND OTHER PREPARATION
Reading for seminars, lectures, and other teaching sessions:
You are expected to prepare for each teaching session by reading in advance, whether it is a lecture,
seminar, or presentation session. For some weeks, there are also set tasks to prepare in advance of the
teaching session. All teaching sessions are planned on the assumption that you will arrive prepared and
ready to fully participate in discussions.
Making the most of your reading:
Above the reading list for each week, there is a short list of questions. These are intended to guide your
reading: keep these questions in mind as you read, and try to answer them when you have finished your
reading. The questions break each topic down into more manageable chunks, and indicate what areas you
need to know about for seminars, essays, and exam revision.
General reading lists:
The module is broken down into four blocks: The Asylum/ Victorian Psychology/ Modern Madness/
Madness in Post-1945 Britain. A general reading list for each block is given at the relevant place in this
Handbook. This contains books or articles which are useful for each week in the block. It does not replace
set reading, but you may find this general reading useful to put detailed consideration of individual topics
in a broader context.
Key texts:
For each teaching session, there is a list of key texts. These usually amount to TWO texts per week,
although if key readings are particularly short/long this number may change. In addition, for some weeks
there are essential primary sources or other documents which you must read. These are always clearly
indicated at the head of the reading list for each week. You must read for lectures as well as seminars.
Key texts which are not readily available in the library or online will be photocopied and distributed
before each session. IMPORTANT NOTE: key texts represent the minimum reading for each session.
You should always aim to read more widely.
Additional reading lists:
For each week, there is an additional reading list. These are sometimes quite long – don’t be put off! You
are not expected to read everything on the list. Longer reading lists are provided because you need to read
more widely than the set texts for essays, to ensure that you have the option of exploring topics from lots
of different angles, and to make sure that you will always be able to find some items from the reading list
in the library.
Library and electronic resources:
The library is well-stocked for this module, and many of the texts can be downloaded. Some items are
available via the external links section on Blackboard.
Items from electronic journals, or via Blackboard are indicated on the reading list as follows:
Downloadable: *
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Blackboard [BB]
If you have any suggestions about new books for the library which might be useful for this module, or
buying additional copies of books the library already holds, please let me know.
Blackboard:
Important course documents and information, including this module handbook, are available via
Blackboard. Powerpoint presentations for lectures and any seminar worksheets will be posted on
Blackboard on a weekly basis. Lecture handouts will not be posted: if you miss a lecture, you have to
contact me to obtain copies of the material.
Blackboard also contains links to relevant websites. The reading list for each week usually flags up sites
which are useful for particular topics, but it is worth exploring these sites yourself. New links will
sometimes be added as I find more relevant online material. You will be notified of any additions to the
‘useful links’ section of Blackboard via e-mail.
TEACHING AND LEARNING METHODS
This module will be taught in two-hour slots through a mixture of lectures, seminars, primary source-
based sessions, and presentations.
• Lectures on this module are interactive. The aim of these lectures is not for the tutor to provide
comprehensive information on a particular topic which you simply write down. You are expected
to arrive prepared for each lecture, having read the set texts and the information sheets provided.
The lectures are really introductions to a topic: they help you to pick out the main themes and
historiographical trends, and are intended to guide and focus your reading and independent
thought on the topic. All lecture sessions will include time to ask questions, and most will include
time to discuss issues in small groups or to participate in other activities relevant to the topic.
• Seminars concentrate more intensively on specific issues and provide the opportunity for fuller
discussion of events / themes / concepts / historiographical considerations, which are central to the
module. Seminars are linked to lectures: the lecture provides a broad introduction, and the seminar
provides the opportunity to discuss issues in more depth, to explore ideas in a group setting, and
to analyse key arguments and concepts. Some seminars will focus on in-depth analysis of selected
secondary sources.
• Presentations provide leeway to let you and others taking the module set the agenda and examine
areas of interest within an overall theme.
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ASSESSMENT
You will be assessed by means of a combination of an assessed essay and an examination paper. You will
also be required to submit a piece of non-assessed work.
Non-assessed (formative) work
The non-assessed (formative) assignment will be a historiographical essay of 1,000 words. A

historiographical essay is a survey of the historiography of a particular topic. The easiest way to think
about a historiographical essay is that it is like a normal history essay, but with the focus on how and why
historians have written about the topic in particular ways, and why they have agreed or disagreed.
Most students are nervous about producing a historiographical essay, as they have not written this type of
coursework before, but we will spend plenty of time discussing historiography and the historiographical
essay in Semester 1, particularly in weeks 2 and 4. The questions for the historiographical essay can be
found at the back of this module handbook.
The formative assignment does not count towards your final mark for the module, but it offers the chance
for extensive feedback on your work. It is designed to help you and to highlight your strengths and
weaknesses. It is proven that students who put a great deal of effort into the formative assignment and pay
attention to feedback perform better on their assessed essays and on the examination. All historiographical
essay questions are related to ‘The Asylum’. This is a potentially examinable topic.
The historiographical essay must employ the conventions of scholarly presentation and must be submitted
in accordance with the procedures and dates as outlined in Information for all Students taking Modules in
History in Year 2.
The deadline for the historiographical essay on this module is Monday 15 November 2010.
Assessed Essay
You must submit ONE assessed essay of not more than 2,000 words, which will contribute 25% of the
final mark for the module. The essay is designed to give you the opportunity to demonstrate your ability to
review evidence or the historiography, draw appropriate conclusions, and employ the formal conventions
of scholarly presentations. Please choose a question from one of the assessed essay topics, which can
be found in the back of this module handbook. The assessed essay must be submitted in accordance
with the procedures and dates as outlined in Information for all Students taking Modules in History in
Year 2.
For the deadline, see the Year 2 Handbook.
Written Examination
In addition to the assessed essay, the module is examined by an unseen three-hour written paper, which
will take place during the second assessment period (i.e. in May/June 2011). The examination counts for
75% of the final mark for this module. In deciding classification, equal weight is given to all final marks.
A specimen examination paper is provided in the back of this module handbook.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The 'Information for all Students taking Modules in History in Year 2'
contains important information on essay writing which you should consult.
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MODULE OVERVIEW
What is madness? How can we tell the difference between sanity and insanity, and who decides where this
line should be drawn? These questions have been debated for centuries, and the different answers given
provide a unique glimpse into past ideas of identity, agency, and the limits of freedom. At the heart of
debates on madness lies the problem of what it means to be human. This module provides an introduction
to transformations in the conceptualisation, treatment, and experience of mental illness in Britain over the
past two centuries. Lectures provide a broad overview of key themes, including: the growth and decline of
the asylum; class, gender, and madness; madness in popular culture; psychology and psychiatry in war;
psychoanalysis; and critiques of psychiatric power. Seminars provide the opportunity to discuss and
debate these issues in more depth, and to develop skills in analysing different historiographical approaches
and different types of source material. In both lectures and seminars, topics will be placed in the context of
major historiographical debates. The emphasis throughout will be on uncovering the cultural resonances
of madness, psychology and psychiatry over the period; changes in conceptualising mental health and
illness; understanding the different perspectives on madness provided by different agents (for example
psychiatrists, patients, cultural commentators, and representatives of the arts); and analysing how ideas of
mind are mediated through different modes of representation.
AIMS OF MODULE
The aims of this module are:
• to investigate the history and historiography of psychiatry and psychology in Britain, c. 1800-
2000;
• to explore transformations in the conceptualisation, treatment, and experience of mental illness
over the past two centuries;
• to relate shifts in psychiatry and psychology to broader social and cultural changes in modern
Britain;
• to examine a range of representations of madness, including art, literature, film, and newspapers;
• to make students aware of a range of perspectives from which the history of mental illness can be
written;
• to analyse the social and cultural construction of psychiatric knowledge, incorporating concepts of
class, gender, race and age, and critically interrogating ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’;
• to examine and independently analyse the complex set of processes concerned in ideas of mental
health and illness, including the dynamic interplay of medical, scientific, and ‘everyday’
knowledges; the shifting roles of psychiatrists, patients, and public; and the tensions between
‘subjective’ experience and ‘objective’ knowledge.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of the module you should have acquired a key set of skills and knowledge which will enable
you to:
- demonstrate a broad and systematic knowledge of the history of psychiatry and psychology in
Britain, 1800-2000;
- express your ideas on and assessments of the social and cultural importance of psychiatry and
psychology in Britain, 1800-2000;
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- identify strengths, weaknesses, problems, and/or peculiarities of alternative historical/
historiographical interpretations;
- demonstrate an awareness of a range of relevant primary sources and an appreciation of how
historians have approached them.
In more detail, this means you should be able to:
- identify the nature and scope of the issues raised by the social and cultural history of psychiatry
and psychology in Britain, 1800-2000;
- evaluate the interrelation of medical, social, and institutional change in experiences of mental
health and illness;
- demonstrate an in-depth and critical understanding of concepts of medicine, science, technology,
identity, and cultural construction, and how these concepts have been deployed in historical and
historiographical writing on psychiatry and psychology;
- analyse key themes and issues in the social and cultural history of psychiatry and psychology in
the light of these ideas, contexts, and frameworks;
- summarise and critically evaluate the relative merits and demerits of alternative views and
interpretations about psychiatry and psychology in British culture, and evaluate their significance;
- assess how psychological knowledge was created, disseminated, and represented in a range of
forums such as medical texts, novels, films and newspapers throughout the period;
- identify problems, assess evidence, and reach independent conclusions on the social and cultural
history of psychiatry and psychology;
- demonstrate a critical understanding of the potentialities and problems of researching and writing
the history of psychiatry and psychology.
The transferable skills you have acquired and developed during the module should enable you to:
- present, accurately, succinctly, and lucidly, and in written or oral form, your arguments in
accordance with appropriate scholarly conventions;
- use a range of information technology resources to assist with information retrieval;
- work as part of a team in seminar or tutorial discussions;
- independently organise your own study methods and workload.
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WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Lecture (Wednesday 6 October)
Outline
This session provides a brief introduction to the module, and introduces some of the main approaches to
the history of psychiatry, psychology and madness.
Key questions
- What is madness?
- What is the difference between the history of psychiatry, the history of psychology, and the
history of madness?
- How and why have historical approaches to psychiatry and madness changed since the 1960s?
Key texts
Please read BOTH of the following items:
M. Neve, ‘Medicine and the mind’, in I. Loudon (ed.), Western Medicine: an illustrated history (1997),
pp. 233-48.
R. Porter, ‘Mental illness’ in R. Porter (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (1996), pp. 278-
303.
Additional reading
T.M. Brown, ‘Mental diseases’, in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of
Medicine. Vol 1 (1993), pp. 438-63.
J. Busfield, ‘Mental illness’ in Cooter and Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth
Century (2003), pp. 633-52.
J. Goldstein, ‘Psychiatry’ in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of
Medicine. Vol 2 (1993), pp. 1350-72.
C.F. Graumann, ‘Psyche and her descendants’, in C.F. Graumann and K.J. Gergen (eds), Historical
Dimensions of Psychological Discourse (1996), pp. 83-100.
G. Gutting, ‘Michel Foucault’s Phänomenologie des Krankengeistes’, in R. Porter and M. Micale (eds),
Discovering the History of Psychiatry (1994), pp. 331-347.
L.S. Hearnshaw, A short history of British psychology, 1840-1940 (1964).
D. Ingleby, ‘The social construction of mental illness’, in P. Wright and D. Treacher (eds), The Problem
of Medical Knowledge: examining the social construction of medicine (1982), pp. 123-43.
C. Jones and R. Porter (eds), Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body (1994).
M. Micale, ‘The psychiatric body’ in Cooter and Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the
Twentieth Century (2003), pp. 323-46.
R. Porter, ‘Orientations’ in his Mind-Forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the
Restoration to the Regency (1987), pp. 1-32.
R. Porter and M. Micale, ‘Reflections on psychiatry and its histories’ in R. Porter and M. Micale (eds),
Discovering the History of Psychiatry (1994).
J.D. Pressman, ‘Concepts of mental illness in the West’, in K.F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World
History of Human Disease (1993), pp. 59-85.
P. Rabinow, ‘Introduction’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (1984), pp. 3-29.
N. Rose, ‘Power and subjectivity: critical history and psychology’, in C.F. Graumann and K.J. Gergen
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(eds), Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse (1996), pp. 103-124.
N. Rose, ‘Psychiatry: the discipline of mental health’, in P. Miller and N. Rose (eds), The Power of
Psychiatry (1986), pp. 43-84.
N. Rose, ‘Power and subjectivity: critical history and psychology’, in C.F. Graumann and K.J. Gergen
(eds), Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse (1996), pp. 103-124.
G. Rosen, ‘Mental disorder, social deviance and culture pattern: some methodological issues in the
historical study of mental illness’, in G. Mona and J.L. Brand (eds), Psychiatry and its history:
methodological problems in research (1970), pp. 172-194.
R. Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880 (2000).
A. Scull, ‘Psychiatry and its historians’, History of Psychiatry 2 (1991), pp. 239-250.
A. Scull, ‘Humanitarianism or control? Some observations on the historiography of Anglo-American
psychiatry’ in S. Cohen and A. Scull (eds), Social Control and the State (1983), pp. 118-40.
*A. Scull, ‘A quarter century of the history of psychiatry”, Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences 35 (1999), pp. 239-246.
C. Sengoopta, ‘Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’, in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp.
245-47.
L. Stone, ‘Madness’, in P. Burke (ed), Critical Essays on Michel Foucault (1992).
M. Thomson, ‘The psychological body’ in Cooter and Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the
R. Thomson, The Pelican History of Psychology (1968).
*J. Weeks, ‘Foucault for historians’, History Workshop Journal 14:1 (1982), pp. 106-118.
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BLOCK 1: THE ASYLUM
This block examines the asylum, the central institution for the treatment of madness from the nineteenth
century until well into the twentieth century. It covers the rise and expansion of the asylum, the optimism
attached to the asylum as a curative institution and the failure of these hopes, and class and gender as
factors influencing attitudes towards insanity and admission to the asylum.
GENERAL READING
J. Busfield, Managing Madness: changing ideas and practice (1986).

W.F. Bynum et al, The Anatomy of Madness, 3 vols (1985-1988). [contains several relevant essays]
M. Donnelly, Managing the Mind: a study of medical psychology in early nineteenth-century Britain
(1983).
P. Fennell, Treatment without Consent (1996).
D. Gittins, Madness in its place: narratives of Severalls Hospital, 1913-1997 (1998).
D. Ingleby, ‘Mental health and social order’, in S. Cohen and A. Scull (eds), Social Control and the State
(1983), pp. 141-90.
K. Jones, Asylums and After: a revised history of the mental health services from the early eighteenth
century to the 1990s (1993).
K. Jones, A History of the Mental Health Services (1972), Part 2.
J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions and society, 1800-1914 (1999).
J. Melling and B. Forsythe, The politics of madness: the state, insanity and society in England, 1845-1914
(London, 2006).
P. Michael, Care and treatment of the mentally ill in North Wales 1800-2000 (2003).
L. Otis (ed.), Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: an anthology (2002).
W.L. Parry-Jones, The trade in lunacy: a study of private madhouses in England in the 18th and 19th
centuries (1972).
J.L. Ray, ‘Models of madness in Victorian asylum practice’, European Journal of Sociology 22 (1981),
pp. 229-264.
A. Scull, Museums of madness: the social organisation of insanity in 19th century England (1979).
A. Scull, The most solitary of afflictions: madness and society in Britain, 1700-1900 (London, 1993).
A. Scull (ed.), Madhouses, mad-doctors and madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the Victorian era
(1981).
A. Scull, C. MacKenzie, and N. Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: the transformation of the mad-doctoring
trade (1997).
Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac (1997), pp. 33-
68.
L. Smith, 'Cure, comfort and safe custody': public lunatic asylums in early nineteenth-century England
(1999).
R. Smith, ‘The medical viewpoint’ in his Trial By Medicine: insanity and responsibility in Victorian trials
(1981), pp. 34-66.
WEEK 2: INTRODUCTION TO THE ASYLUM
THE ASYLUM: RISE, EXPANSION AND STAGNATION

Outline
The eighteenth century saw increasing institutionalisation and the growth of a custodial approach to
madness. From the early nineteenth century onwards, the asylum became gradually accepted as the
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appropriate site for the care and treatment of the insane. Over the course of the century, there was a rapid
rise in the number of asylums built, and the aggregate of patients confined in them. As more and more
patients were committed to asylums, the therapeutic optimism which characterised the early part of the
century waned, and asylums began to be seen as simply ‘warehouses for the insane’ (Scull). This lecture
provides a general overview of the history of the asylum in the nineteenth century.
Key questions
- Why did the asylum become integral to the treatment of madness in the early nineteenth century?
- What was the medical and social context of asylum building?
- How and why have historians disagreed over the rise and fall of the asylum?
Key texts
Please read the following item:
R. Porter, 'Madness and its institutions', in A. Wear (ed.), Medicine in society: historical essays (1992),
pp. 277-301.
Additional reading
Also see the general reading list for Block 1, especially general books on the asylum.
The rise of the asylum
J. Andrews, 'The rise of the asylum in Britain', in D. Brunton (ed.), Medicine transformed: health, disease
and society in Europe, 1800-1930 (2004), pp. 298-330.
*M. Brown, 'Rethinking early nineteenth-century asylum reform', Historical Journal 49:2 (2006), 425-52.
*E. Hare, ‘Was insanity on the increase?’, British Journal of Psychiatry 142:5 (1983), pp. 439-455.
N. Hervey, ‘A slavish bowing down: the Lunacy Commission and the psychiatric profession’, in Bynum,
Porter and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness, vol. 2 (1985).
*P. McCandless, '"Build! Build!" The controversy over the care of the chronically insane in England,
1855-1870', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53 (1979), 553-74.
*D. Mellett, ‘Bureaucracy and mental illness: the Commissioners in Lunacy’, Medical History 25 (1981).
*A. Scull, ‘Was insanity increasing? A response to Edward Hare’, British Journal of Psychiatry 144:4
(1984), pp. 432-436.
*L. Smith, 'Behind closed doors: lunatic asylum keepers, 1800-1860', Social History of Medicine 1 (1988),
pp. 301-27.
L. Smith, 'The county asylum in the mixed economy of care, 1808-1845', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe
(eds), Insanity, institutions, and society, 1800-1914: a social history of madness in comparative
perspective (1999), pp. 33-47.
T. Turner, ‘The early 1900s and before’ in H. Freeman (ed.) A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp. 1-29
*D. Wright, ‘Getting out of the asylum: understanding the confinement of the insane in the nineteenth
century’, Social History of Medicine 10:1 (1997), pp. 137-155.
Case studies of asylums and their keepers
S. Cherry, Mental health care in modern England: the Norfolk lunatic asylum - St. Andrew's Hospital, c.
1810-1998 (2003).
*B. Forsythe, J. Melling and R. Adair, 'The New Poor Law and the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum: the
Devon experience 1834-1884', Social History of Medicine 9 (1996), 3pp. 35-55.
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B. Forsythe, 'Politics of lunacy: central state regulation and the Devon Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1845-
1914', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions, and society, 1800-1914: a social
history of madness in comparative perspective (1999), pp. 68-92.
C. MacKenzie, Psychiatry for the rich: a history of Ticehurst private asylum, 1792-1917 (1992).
P. Michael and D. Hirst, 'Establishing the "rule of kindness": the foundation of the North Wales Lunatic
Asylum, Denbigh', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions, and society, 1800-
1914: a social history of madness in comparative perspective (1999), pp. 159-179.
E. Murphy, ‘Workhouse care of the insane, 1845-1890’, in P. Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental illness and learning
disability since 1850: finding a place for mental disorder in the United Kingdom (2006), pp. 24-45.
*M. Neve and T. Turner, 'What the Doctor thought and did: Sir James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938)',
Medical History 39 (1995), pp. 399-432.
B. O'Shea and A. Falvey, 'A history of the Richmond Asylum (St. Brendan's Hospital), Dublin', in H.
Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry. Vol. 2: the aftermath (1996), pp.
407-33.
A. Scull, “A Victorian alienist: John Conolly”, in Bynum, Porter & Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness,
vol. 1 (1985).
A. Scull, C. Mackenzie and N. Hervey, Masters of Bedlam (1996).
A. Scull (ed.) The Asylum as Utopia: W.A.F. Browne and the Mim-19th century consolidation of
psychiatry(1990).
A. Shepherd, 'Mental health care and charity for the middling sort: Holloway Sanatorium 1885–1900', in
A. Borsay and P. Shapely (eds), Medicine, charity and mutual aid: the consumption of health and
welfare in Britain, c.1550-1950 (2007), pp. 163-82.
E.D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the practice of late nineteenth-century psychiatry
(1986).
L. Smith, ''A worthy feeling gentleman': Samuel Hitch at Gloucester Asylum 1828-1847', in H. Freeman
and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry. Vol. 2: the aftermath (1996), pp. 479-99.
J. Todd and L. Ashworth, 'The West Riding asylum and James Crichton-Browne, 1818-1876', in G.E.
Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991), pp. 389-418.
D. Wright, Mental disability in Victorian England: the Earlswood Asylum 1847-1901 (2001).
Stagnation and decline
M. Clark, ‘The rejection of psychological approaches to mental disorder in late nineteenth-century British
psychiatry’, in A. Scull (ed.), Madhouses, mad-doctors and madmen: the social history of
psychiatry in the Victorian era (1981), pp. 271-312.
M. Clark, ‘“Morbid introspection”, unsoundness of mind, and British psychological medicine, c. 1830-c.
1900’ in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness Vol. 3.
R.C. Olby, ‘Constitutional and hereditary disorders’, in W.F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Companion
Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine, Vol. 1 (1993), pp. 412-437.
E. Shorter, ‘The asylum era’, in his A History of Psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of
Prozac (1997), pp. 33-68.
T. Turner, ‘Henry Maudsley: psychiatrist, philosopher, and entrepreneur’ in Bynum, Porter, and Shepherd
(eds), Anatomy of Madness Vol. 3.
Historiography of the asylum
R. Furlong, 'Haven within or without the hospital gate: a reappraisal of asylum provision in theory and
practice', in D. Tomlinson and J. Carrier (eds), Asylum in the community (London, 1996), 135-68.
*S. Lanzoni, 'The asylum in context: an essay review', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences 60:4 (2005), 499-505.
B. Luckin, 'Towards a social history of institutionalization', Social History 8:1 (1983), 87-94.
E. Malcolm, 'Asylums and other 'total institutions': recent studies', Éire-Ireland 22:3 (1987), 151-160.
J. Melling, ‘Accommodating madness: new research in the social history of insanity and institutions’, in J.
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Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions and society, 1800-1914 (1999), pp. 1-30.
J. Raftery, 'The decline of asylum or the poverty of the concept?', in D. Tomlinson and J. Carrier (eds),
Asylum in the Community (London, 1996), 18-30.
*A. Scull, 'Museums of madness revisited', Social History of Medicine 6 (1993), 3-23.
A. Scull, 'Asylums: utopias and realities', in D. Tomlinson and J. Carrier (eds), Asylum in the community
(London, 1996), 7-17.
A. Scull, 'Rethinking the history of asylumdom', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe, Bill (eds), Insanity,
institutions, and society, 1800-1914 : a social history of madness in comparative perspective
(London and New York, 1999), 295-315.
N. Tomes, ‘The Anglo-American asylum in historical perspective’, in C. Smith and J.A. Giggs (eds),
Location and Stigma: contemporary perspectives on mental health and mental health care (1988).
DEBATE: THE ASYLUM: SUCCESS OR FAILURE?

Seminar (Thursday 14 October)
Outline
In this seminar we will debate the question:
‘Did the asylum succeed or fail in the nineteenth century?’
The class will divide into two groups, one arguing that the asylum was a success, the other that it was a
failure. Students can pick their own sides. You must prepare for the seminar by making a list of arguments
for your case. There will be an opportunity to discuss arguments within the group before the debate
begins.
Key texts
Please read at least ONE of the following items:
A. Scull, ‘The social production of insanity’, in his The Most Solitary of Afflictions: madness and society
in Britain, 1700-1900 (1993), pp. 334-374.
E. Shorter, ‘The asylum era’, in his A History of Psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of
Prozac (1997), pp. 33-68.
Additional reading
Please also see the Block 1 general reading and the Week 2 lecture reading.
WEEK 3: THE ASYLUM AS CURATIVE INSTITUTION
THE ASYLUM AS CURATIVE INSTITUTION

Outline
In the early years of asylum-building, there was great optimism surrounding the potential of the asylum as
a curative institution – a place where the mad could be restored to their right minds. These hopes faded as
the number of patients increased, and asylums developed into little more than giant holding pens for the
insane. This lecture will examine the changing role of the asylum as a curative institution, including
asylum landscaping and architecture, methods of treatment within the asylum, and how changing
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approaches to treatment reflected changing ideas of the purpose and possibilities of the asylum.
Key questions
- How effective was the asylum as a curative institution?

- What kinds of treatment did the asylum offer?
- How and why did types of treatment change over the nineteenth century?
Key texts
Please read at least TWO of the following items:
N. Tomes, ‘The great restraint controversy: a comparative perspective on Anglo-American psychiatry in

the nineteenth century’, in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness, Vol. 3 (1998),
pp. 190-225.
M. Donnelly, ‘The architecture of confinement’, in his Managing the Mind: a study of medical
psychology in early nineteenth-century Britain (1983), pp. 48-67.
W. F. Bynum, ‘Rationales for therapy in British psychiatry, 1780-1835”, in A. Scull (ed.), Madhouses,
Mad-Doctors and Madmen (1981).
Additional reading
Moral management and other treatments
G.E. Berrios, ‘Psychosurgery in Britain and elsewhere: a conceptual history’, in G. Berrios and Hugh
Freeman (eds), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991)
G.E. Berrios, ‘The scientific origins of electroconvulsive therapy”, History of Psychiatry 8 (1997), pp.
105-19.
G.E. Berrios, ‘The origins of psychosurgery: Shaw, Burckhardt and Moniz’, History of Psychiatry 8
(1997), pp. 61-81.
*A. Beveridge and E. Renvoize, 'Electricity: a history of its use in the treatment of mental illness in
Britain during the second half of the 19th century', British Journal of Psychiatry 153 (1988), pp.
157-62.
C.S. Breathnach, ‘Hallaran’s circulating swing’, History of Psychiatry 21 (2010), pp. 79-84.
C. L. Cherry, A Quiet Haven: Quakers, Moral Treatment, and Asylum Reform (1989).
D. Crossley, ‘The introduction of leucotomy’, History of Psychiatry 4 (1993), pp. 553-64.
Anne Digby, ‘Moral treatment at the York Retreat’, in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of
Madness, vol. 2 (1985).
A. Digby, Madness, morality and medicine - a study of the York Retreat 1796-1914 (Cambridge, 1985).
P. Fennell, Treatment without consent: law, psychiatry and the treatment of mentally disordered people
since 1845 (1996), especially chapters 1-5.
M. Finnane, ‘The ruly and the unruly: isolation and inclusion in the management of the insane’, in C.
Strange and A. Bashford (eds), Isolation: places and practices of exclusion (2003).
* D. Finnegan, ‘“An aid to mental health”: natural history, alienists and therapeutics in Victorian Scotland’, Studies
in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39:3 (2008), pp. 326-37.
F. James, ‘Insulin treatment in psychiatry’, History of Psychiatry 3 (1992), pp. 221-35.
D. Healy, ‘Some continuities and discontinuities in the pharmacotherapy of nervous conditions before and
after chlorpromazine and imipramine’, History of Psychiatry 11 (2000), pp. 393-412.
D. Healy, The creation of psychopharmacology (2004).
S. Lobban, 'Healing for the body as well as for the soul: treatment in the Aberdeen Royal Lunatic Asylum
during the nineteeth century', in T. Brotherstone and D. Withrington (eds), The city and its worlds :
aspects of Aberdeen's history since 1794 (1996), pp. 130-49.
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H. Merskey, ‘Somatic treatments, ignorance, and the historiography of psychiatry’, History of Psychiatry
5 (1994).
M. Micale, ‘The psychiatric body’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the
P. Michael and D. Hirst, ‘Establishing the ‘rule of kindness’: the foundation of the North Wales Lunatic
Asylum, Denbigh’, in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800-
1914 (1999).
I.R. Morus, ‘Bodily disciplines and disciplined bodies: instruments, skills and Victorian electrotherapeutics’, Social
History of Medicine 19:2 (2006), pp. 241-59.
A. Scull, 'A brilliant career? John Conolly and Victorian psychiatry', Victorian Studies 27 (1984), 203-35.
A. Scull, C. MacKenzie, and N. Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: the transformation of the mad-doctoring
trade (Princeton (NJ), 1997).
A. Scull, ‘Moral treatment reconsidered’, in A. Scull (ed.), Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Madmen
(1981).
A. Scull, ‘Desperate remedies: a gothic tale of madness and modern medicine’, Psychological Medicine
17:3 (1987), pp. 561-77.
A. Scull, ‘Psychiatrists and historical “facts” part 1: the historiography of somatic treatments’, History of
Psychiatry 6 (1995), pp. 225-41.
A. Scull, ‘Focal sepsis and psychosis: the career of Thomas Chivers Graves’, in H. Freeman and G.E.
Berrios (eds), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, Vol. 2 (1996).
*A. Shepherd and D. Wright, ‘Madness, suicide and the Victorian asylum: attempted self-murder in the
age of non-restraint’, Medical History 46:2 (2002), pp. 175-196.
*A. Suzuki, 'The politics and ideology of non-restraint: the case of the Hanwell Asylum', Medical History
39 (1995), 1-17.
J.B. Taylor and S. Shuttleworth, ‘Moral management and the rise of the psychiatrist’, in their Embodied
Selves: an anthology of psychological texts, 1830-1890 (1998), pp. 231-50.
Architecture
M. Donnelly, ‘The architecture of confinement’, in his Managing the Mind: a study of medical
psychology in early nineteenth-century Britain (1983), pp. 48-67
*B. Edginton, 'The design of moral architecture at The York Retreat', Journal of Design History 16:2
(2003), 103-18.
B. Edginton, 'A space for moral management: the York Retreat's influence on asylum design', in L.E.
Topp, J.E. Moran, and J. Andrews (eds), Madness, architecture and the built environment:
psychiatric spaces in historical context (2007), 85-104.
M. Guyatt, ‘A semblance of home: mental asylum interiors, 1880-1914’, in S. McKellar and P. Sparke
(eds), Interior Design and Identity (2004).
C. Hickman, 'The picturesque at Brislington House, Bristol: the role of landscape in relation to the
treatment of mental illness in the early nineteenth-century asylum', Garden History 33:1 (2005), 47-
60.
C. Hickman, ‘Cheerful prospects and tranquil restoration: the visual experience of landscape as part of the
therapeutic regime of the British asylum, 1800-60’, History of Psychiatry 20 (2009), pp. 425-41.
T.A. Markus, 'Buildings for the sad, the bad and the mad in urban Scotland, 1780-1830', in T.A. Markus
and H. Mulholland (eds), Order in space and society: architectural form and its context in the
Scottish Enlightenment (1982), 25-114.
T.A. Markus, 'Buildings and the ordering of minds and bodies', in P. Jones (ed.), Philosophy and science
in the Scottish Enlightenment (1989), 169-224.
*C. Philo, 'Madness, memory, time, and space: the eminent psychological physician and the unnamed
artist-patient', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24:6 (2006), 891-918.
C. Philo, 'Scaling the asylum: three geographies of the Inverness District Lunatic Asylum (Craig Dunain)',
in L.E. Topp, J.E. Moran, and J. Andrews (eds), Madness, architecture and the built environment :
psychiatric spaces in historical context (2007), 105-30.
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S. Piddock, A Space of Their Own: the archaeology of nineteenth century lunatic asylums in Britain,
South Australia, and Tasmania (2007).
M. Reuben, 'The architecture of psychological management: the Irish asylums (1801-1922)',
Psychological Medicine 26 (1996), 1179-1189.
S. Rutherford, 'Victorian and Edwardian institutional landscapes in England', Landscapes 5:2 (2004), 25-
41.
S. Rutherford, 'Landscapers for the mind: English asylum designers, 1845-1914', Garden History 33:1
(2005), 61-86.
A. Scull, ‘The insanity of place’, History of Psychiatry 15 (2004), pp. 417-36.
A. Scull, ‘The architecture of the Victorian lunatic asylum”, in A. D. King (ed.), Buildings and Society
(1980)
L. Smith, 'The architecture of confinement: urban public asylums in England, 1750-1820', in L.E. Topp,
J.E. Moran, and J. Andrews (eds), Madness, architecture and the built environment : psychiatric
spaces in historical context (2007), 41-62.
C. Stevenson, ‘Medicine and architecture’ in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the
History of Medicine, Vol 2., pp. 1495-1519.
C. Stevenson, Medicine and magnificence: British hospital and asylum architecture, 1660-1815 (2000).
J. Taylor, Hospital and asylum architecture in England, 1840-1914: building for health care (1991).
J. Taylor, 'The architect and the Pauper Asylum in late nineteenth-century England: G.T. Hine's 1901
review of asylum space and planning', in L.E. Topp, J.E. Moran, and J. Andrews (eds), Madness,
architecture and the built environment : psychiatric spaces in historical context (2007), pp. 263-84.
The website ‘County Asylums: Rediscovering the Asylums and Mental Hospitals of England and Wales’
contains numerous information on county asylums, and many photographs of these asylums which
will allow you to see the changing architectural styles: http://www.countyasylums.com/index.html
WEEK 4: CLASS, GENDER, AND THE ASYLUM
CLASS, GENDER, AND THE ASYLUM

Outline
Earlier histories of psychiatry, influenced by Marxist approaches to history, focused on social class as the
dominant factor determining experiences of the asylum. With the rise of women’s history in the 1970s and
1980s, it began to be argued that madness was a ‘female malady’, and that women formed the majority of
asylum patients. During the 1990s, more sophisticated approaches to gender and class began to be
developed by historians of madness, which emphasised the interrelation of class and gender in shaping the
experiences of madness of men and women. This lecture will explore historical and historiographical
accounts of class, gender, and the asylum.
Key questions
- In what ways did class and gender influence admission to the asylum and experiences within it?
- Why have some historians argued that madness is a female malady?
- How have historians’ opinions on the roles of class and gender in shaping experiences of madness
changed since the 1970s?
Page 17 of 60
Key texts
Please read:
[BB] J. Andrews and A. Digby, ‘Introduction: gender and class in the historiography of British and Irish
psychiatry’, in J. Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: perspectives
on gender and class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry (2004), pp. 7-44.
Additional reading
Poverty and class
*R. Adair, B. Forsythe and J. 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 (1998), pp. 1-25.
*R. Adair, J. Melling and B. Forsythe, '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), pp. 373-401.
J. Andrews, 'Raising the tone of asylumdom: maintaining and expelling pauper lunatics at the Glasgow
Royal Asylum in the nineteenth century', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions,
and society, 1800-1914 : a social history of madness in comparative perspective (1999), pp. 200-22.
*P. Bartlett, 'The asylum, the workhouse, and the voice of the insane poor in 19th-century England',
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 21:4 (1998), pp. 421-32.
F. Crompton, 'Needs and desires in the care of pauper lunatics: admissions to Worcester Asylum, 1852-
72', in P. Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental illness and learning disability since 1850 : finding a
place for mental disorder in the United Kingdom (2006), pp. 46-64.
K. Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry (1981).
G.A. Doody, A. Beveridge and E.C. Johnstone, 'Poor and mad: a study of patients admitted to the Fife and
Kinross District Asylum between 1874 and 1899', Psychological Medicine 26:5 (1996), pp. 887-97.
*R. Ellis, 'The asylum, the Poor Law, and a reassessment of the four-shilling grant: admissions to the
County Asylums of Yorkshire in the nineteenth century', Social History of Medicine 19:1 (2006),
pp. 55-71.
*B. Forsythe, J. Melling, and R. Adair, 'The New Poor Law and the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum: the
Devon experience 1834-1884', Social History of Medicine 9 (1996), 335-55.
R. Hunter and I. Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor (1974)
C. MacKenzie, Psychiatry for the rich: a history of Ticehurst private asylum, 1792-1917 (London, 1992).
*E. Murphy, 'The New Poor Law Guardians and the administration of insanity in east London, 1834-
1844', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77:1 (2003), 45-74.
*C. Smith, 'Parsimony, power, and prescriptive legislation: the politics of pauper lunacy in
Northamptonshire, 1845-1876', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81:2 (2007), 359-85.
L. Smith, '"Levelled to the same common standard?" Social class in the lunatic asylum, 1780-1860', in O.
Ashton, R. Fyson, and S. Roberts (eds), The duty of discontent: essays for Dorothy Thompson
(1995), 142-66.
[BB] L. Walsh, 'A class apart? Admissions to the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum 1890-1910', in J.
Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and seclusion, class and custody: perspectives on gender and
class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry (Clio Medica, 73) (2004).
D. Wright, 'The discharge of pauper lunatics from county asylums in mid-Victorian England: the case of
Buckinghamshire, 1853-1872', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions, and
society, 1800-1914 : a social history of madness in comparative perspective (1999), pp. 93-112.
Gender
Page 18 of 60
L. Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: a history of women and the mind doctors from 1800 to the present
(2008), especially ch. 3, ‘Asylum’.
H. Allen, ‘Psychiatry and the construction of the feminine’, in P. Miller and N. Rose (eds), The Power of
L. Bland, ‘Women Defined’ in her Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885-
1914 (1995), pp. 48-91 [long but good guide to medical views on women’s bodies and minds].
*J. Busfield, ‘The female malady? Men, women and madness in nineteenth century Britain’, Sociology 28
(1994), pp. 259-77.
J. Busfield, Men, Women, and Madness: understanding gender and mental disorder (1996).
*P. Dale, 'Training for work: domestic service as a route out of long-stay institutions before 1959',
Women's History Review 13:3 (2004), pp. 387-406.
K. Davies, '"Sexing the mind?": women, gender and madness in nineteenth century Welsh asylums',
Llafur 7:1 (1996), pp. 29-40.
A. Digby, ‘Women’s biological straitjacket’, in S. Mendus and J. Rendall (eds), Sexuality and
Subordination: interdisciplinary studies of gender in the nineteenth century (1989).
*R.A. Houston, ‘Madness and gender in the long eighteenth century’, Social History 27:3 (2002).
[BB] M. Levine-Clark, ‘“Embarrassed circumstances: gender, poverty, and insanity in the West Riding of
England in the early Victorian years’, in J. Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and seclusion, class
and custody: perspectives on gender and class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry (Clio
Medica, 73) (2004).
Á. McCarthy, 'Hearths, bodies and minds : gender ideology and women's committal to Enniscorthy lunatic
asylum 1916-25', in A. Hayes and D. Urquhart (eds), Irish women's history (2004), pp. 115-136.
J. Melling, '"Buried alive by her friends": asylum narratives and the English governess, 1845-1914', in P.
Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental illness and learning disability since 1850 : finding a place for
mental disorder in the United Kingdom (2006), pp. 65-90.
[BB] J. Melling, 'Sex and sensibility in cultural history: the English governess and the lunatic asylum,
1845-1914', in J. Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and seclusion, class and custody : perspectives
on gender and class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry (Clio Medica, 73) (2004), pp. 177-
221.
D. Pearce, 'Family, gender and class in psychiatric patient care during the 1930s: the Mental Treatment
Act and the Devon Mental Hospital', in P. Dale and J. Melling (ed.), Mental illness and learning
disability since 1850 : finding a place for mental disorder in the United Kingdom (2006), pp. 112-
30.
V. Pedlar, "The most dreadful visitation": male madness in Victorian fiction (2006).
*J. Schwieso, ''Religious fanaticism' and wrongful confinement in Victorian England: the affair of Louisa
Nottidge', Social History of Medicine 9:2 (1996), pp. 159-174.
[BB] A. Shepherd, 'The female patient experience in two late-nineteenth-century Surrey asylums', in J.
Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and seclusion, class and custody: perspectives on gender and
class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry (Clio Medica, 73) (2004), pp. 223-48.
E. Showalter, 'Victorian women and insanity', Victorian Studies 23 (1980), 157-81.
E. Showalter, The Female Malady: women, madness and English culture 1830-1980 (1987).
S. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996).
V. Skultans, Madness and Morals: ideas on insanity in the nineteenth century (1975), ch. 6, ‘Femininity
and Illness’.
H. Small, Love's madness: medicine, the novel, and female insanity, 1800-1865 (1996).
A. Suzuki, 'Lunacy and labouring men: narratives of male vulnerability in mid-Victorian London', in R.E.
Bivins and J.V. Pickstone (eds), Medicine, madness and social history : essays in honour of Roy
Porter (2007), pp. 118-28 and pp. 257-59.
N. Tomes, ‘Feminist histories of psychiatry’ in M. Micale and R. Porter (eds), Discovering the History of
O. Walsh, 'Gendering the asylums: Ireland and Scotland, 1847-1877', in T. Brotherstone, D. Simonton,
and O. Walsh (eds), Gendering Scottish history: an international approach (1999), pp. 199-215.
Page 19 of 60
WOMEN, CRIME AND MADNESS
Seminar (Thursday 28 October)
Outline
In this seminar we will explore the gendered social construction of madness through looking at women,
crime, and madness. We will focus particularly on the distinction between madness and ‘badness’;
infanticide; and the role of class in shaping attitudes towards women, madness, and crime.
Key questions
- How did mad women defy expectations of conventional femininity?

- What types of crime was perceived as typically ‘female’, and why?
- Were women who committed infanticide mad, bad, or sad?
Key texts
Please read BOTH the following items:
R. Smith, ‘Medico-legal views of women’ in his Trial By Medicine: insanity and responsibility in
Victorian trials (1981), pp. 143-62.
H. 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 : a social
history of madness in comparative perspective (1999), pp. 137-156.
Additional reading
S. D’Cruze, Everyday violence in Britain, 1850-1950: gender and class (1999).

M. Francis, ‘Monstrous mothers, monstrous societies: infanticide and the rule of law in eighteenth-century
England’, Eighteenth-century Life (1997), pp. 133-56.
G. Frost, ‘Motherhood on trial: violence and unwed mothers in Victorian England’, in C. Klaver and E.
Rosenman (eds), Other mothers: beyond the maternal ideal (2008), pp. 145-62.
B. Godfrey, S. Farrall, and S. Karstedt, ‘Explaining gendered sentencing patterns for violent men and
women in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period’, British Journal of Criminology 45:5 (2005), pp.
696-720.
C.E. Hallett, ‘Puerperal fever as a source of conflict between midwives and medical men in eighteenth and
early nineteenth century Britain’, in S. McGann and B. Mortimer (eds), New directions in the
history of nursing: international perspectives (2005), pp. 55-67.
* C.E. Hallett, ‘The attempt to understand puerperal fever in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:
the influence of inflammation theory’, Medical History 49:1 (2005), pp. 1-28.
A. Higginbotham, ‘"Sin of the age": infanticide and illegitimacy in Victorian London’, in K. Garrigan
(ed.), Victorian scandals: representations of gender and class (1992), pp. 257-88.
* B. Kelly, ‘Poverty, crime and mental illness: female forensic psychiatric committal in Ireland, 1910–
1948’, Social History of Medicine 21:2 (2008), pp. 311-28.
A-M. Kilday, ‘"Monsters of the vilest kind": infanticidal women and attitudes to their criminality in
eighteenth-century Scotland’, Family & Community History 11:2 (2008), pp. 100-116.
A-M. Kilday, ‘Women and crime’, in H. Barker and E. Chalus (eds), Women's history: Britain, 1700-
1850: an introduction (2005), pp. 174-93.
A. Mangham, Violent women and sensation fiction: crime, medicine and Victorian popular culture
(2007).
H. Marland, ‘Languages and landscapes of emotion: motherhood and puerperal insanity in the nineteenth
century’, in F.B. Alberti (ed.), Medicine, emotion and disease, 1700-1950 (2006), pp. 53-78.
Page 20 of 60
H. Marland, Dangerous motherhood: insanity and childbirth in Victorian Britain (2004).
H. Marland, ‘Disappointment and desolation: women, doctors and interpretations of puerperal insanity in
the nineteenth century’, History of Psychiatry 14:3 (2003), pp. 303-20.
H. Marland, ‘Getting away with murder? Puerperal insanity, infanticide and the defence plea’, in M.
Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: historical perspectives on child murder and concealment, 1550-2000
(2002), pp. 168-92.
H. Marland, ‘At home with puerperal mania: the domestic treatment of the insanity of childbirth in the
nineteenth century’, in P. Bartlett and D. Wright (eds), Outside the walls of the asylum: the history
of care in the community, 1750-2000 (1999), pp. 45-65.
P. Prior, ‘Mad, not bad: crime, mental disorder and gender in nineteenth-century Ireland’, History of
Psychiatry 8:4 (1997), pp. 501-16.
P. Prior, ‘Women, mental disorder and crime in nineteenth century Ireland’, in A. Byrne and M. Leonard
(eds), Women and Irish society: a sociological reader (1997), pp. 219-32.
C. Quinn, ‘Images and impulses: representations of puerperal insanity and infanticide in late Victorian
England’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: historical perspectives on child murder and
concealment, 1550-2000 (2002), pp. 193-215.
C. Rattigan, ‘"I thought from her appearance that she was in the family way": detecting infanticide cases
in Ireland, 1900-1921’, Family & Community History 11:2 (2008), pp. 134-51.
L. Ryan, ‘The press, police and prosecution: perspectives on infanticide in the 1920s’, in A. Hayes and D.
Urquhart, Irish women’s history (2004), pp. 137-51.
J. Sturrock, ‘Murder, gender, and popular fiction by women in the 1860s: Braddon, Oliphant, Yonge’, in
A. Maunder and G. Moore (eds), Victorian crime, madness and sensation (2004), pp. 73-88.
D. Symonds, ‘Reconstructing rural infanticide in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Journal of Women's
History 10 (1998), pp. 63-84.
N. Walker, ‘Infanticide’, in his Crime and Insanity in England (1968), pp. 125-37.
T. Ward, ‘Legislating for human nature: legal responses to infanticide, 1860-1938’, in M. Jackson (ed.),
Infanticide: historical perspectives on child murder and concealment, 1550-2000 (2002), pp. 249-
69.
C. Willis, ‘Wanton women and malignant murderesses: the female criminal and the Victorian reader’, in
M. Hewitt (ed.), Unrespectable recreations (2001), pp. 194-207.
L. Zedner, Women, crime and custody in Victorian England (1991).
WEEK 5: VISITING THE ASYLUM
CARDIFF CITY MENTAL HOSPITAL

Field trip (Wednesday 3 November)
Outline
This week, the group will visit the Whitchurch Hospital. This was originally called the Cardiff City
Mental Hospital, opened in 1908 by Cardiff County Borough Council, and renamed in 1948. More
information about the visit will be distributed in the early weeks of the semester.
******WEEK 6: READING WEEK******
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BLOCK 2: VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY
This block examines differing conceptions of mind and madness throughout the Victorian period,
including techniques for ‘reading’ the mind on the body, such as phrenology; perceptions of the power of
the mind to harm or heal, as in mesmerism, hypnosis, and hysteria; fears of the diffusion of madness
throughout society in the form of hereditary degeneration; and the role of psychology and psychiatry in
classifying and curing ‘deviants’. The final session discusses historical sources for researching madness
and explores whether it is possible to access the authentic voice of the mad.
GENERAL READING
Victorian psychology and allied approaches to mind
M. Donnelly, Managing the Mind: a study of medical psychology in early nineteenth-century Britain
(1983), Part 2.
L.G. Gurjeva, 'James Sully and scientific psychology, 1870-1910', in G.D. Bunn, A. Lovie, and G.
Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain : historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp. 72-94.
B. Haley, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano: Victorian psychophysiology’ in his The Healthy Body and
Victorian Culture (1978), pp. 23-45.
G. Richards, 'Edward Cox, the Psychological Society of Great Britain (1875-1879) and the meanings of an
institutional failure', in G.D. Bunn, A. Lovie, and G. Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain :
historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp. 33-53.
R. Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880 (2000).
R. Rylance, '"The disturbing anarchy of investigation": psychological debate and the Victorian periodical',
in L. Henson et al (eds), Culture and science in the nineteenth-century media (2004), pp. 239-50.
S. Shuttleworth, ‘The malady of thought: embodied memory in Victorian psychology and the novel’, in
M. Campbell, J.M. Labbe, and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Memory and Memorials 1789-1914: literary
and cultural perspectives (2000), pp. 46-59.
R. Smith, 'The physiology of the will: mind, body, and psychology in the periodical literature, 1855-1875',
in G. Cantor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Science serialized : representations of the sciences in
nineteenth-century periodicals (2004), pp. 81-110.
J.B. Taylor, ‘Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious’, in J.B. Bullen (ed.), Writing and
Victorianism (1997), pp. 137-79.
A. Vrettos, 'Victorian psychology', in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing (eds), A companion to the
Victorian novel (2005), pp. 67-83.
A. Vrettos, Somatic fictions: imagining illness in Victorian culture (1995).
Psychiatry, neurology, and materialist approaches to mind
W.F. Bynum, ‘The nervous patient in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain: the psychiatric origins of
British neurology’ in Bynum, Porter, and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness Vol. 1.
M. Clark, ‘The rejection of psychological approaches to mental disorder in late nineteenth-century British
psychiatry’, in A. Scull (ed.), Madhouses, mad-doctors and madmen: the social history of
psychiatry in the Victorian era (1981), pp. 271-312
M. Clark, ‘“Morbid introspection”, unsoundness of mind, and British psychological medicine, c. 1830-c.
1900’ in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness Vol. 3.
*L.S. Jacyna, 'Somatic theories of mind and the interests of medicine in Britain, 1850-1879', Medical
History 26 (1982), 233-58.
*L.S. Jacyna, 'The physiology of mind, the unity of nature, and the moral order in Victorian thought',
British Journal for the History of Science 14 (1981), pp. 109-32.
H. Klein, 'The mechanical age: nineteenth century materialism and the human mind', in A.M. Caleb (ed.),
(Re)creating science in nineteenth-century Britain (2007), pp. 188-201.
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R.C. Olby, ‘Constitutional and hereditary disorders’, in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion
F.C. Rose (ed.). A short history of neurology: the British contribution, 1660-1910 (1999).
A. Stiles (ed.), Neurology and literature, 1860-1920 (2007).
H. Whitaker, C. Smith, M. Upham, and S. Finger (eds), Brain, mind, and medicine: essays in eighteenth-
century neuroscience (2007), pp. 257-70.
WEEK 7: INTRODUCTION TO VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY
VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Lecture (Wednesday 17 November)
Outline
The module so far has focused on institutional approaches to madness. In this block, we turn our attention
to ways of conceptualising the mind and its disorders in Victorian culture. This lecture provides an
overview of the ‘mapping’ of madness over the nineteenth century in psychiatry and psychology, with a
particular focus on different ways of exploring the nature of mind and madness in diverse areas of
Victorian medicine, science, and culture.
Key questions
- How did dominant conceptualisations of mental disorder change over the course of the nineteenth
century?
- What were the key similarities and differences between the explanations of madness put forward
by psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists?
- How did Victorian thinkers characterise the nature of mind-body relations?
Key texts
A. Vrettos, 'Victorian psychology', in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing (eds), A companion to the
Victorian novel (2005), pp. 67-83.
Additional reading
See general reading list for Block 3.
PHRENOLOGY
Seminar (Thursday 18 November)
Outline
The science of phrenology, which evolved from the work of Franz Joseph Gall in the 1790s, held that the
brain was the organ of mind, mind was divided into different faculties, and that the size (and therefore the
development) of these faculties could be detected by analysis of the contours of the skull. Although often
mocked and dismissed as a classic example of Victorian mumbo-jumbo, the science of phrenology had
great cultural resonance in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and also influenced the development of
physiological psychology, and had a profound impact on psychiatric practice. This seminar will explore
the reasons for the popularity and later influence of phrenology in Victorian society.
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Key questions
- How did phrenology achieve such popularity?

- What influence did phrenology have on nineteenth century ideas of brain and mind?
- Why did phrenology fall out of fashion?
Key texts
*R. Cooter, 'Phrenology and British alienists, c. 1825-1845. Part II: Doctrine and practice'. Medical
History, 20 (1976), pp. 135-51.
S. Shuttleworth, ‘Reading the mind: physiognomy and phrenology’, in her Charlotte Brontë and Victorian
Psychology (1996), pp. 57-70
Additional reading
Phrenology
G.N. Cantor, ‘The Edinburgh phrenology debate: 1803-1828’, Annals of Science 32:3 (1975), pp. 195-
218.
G. Cantor, 'A critique of Shapin's social interpretation of the Edinburgh Phrenology Debate', Annals of
Science 33 (1975), pp. 245-56.
J.F. Codell, 'The dilemma of the artist in Millais's Lorenzo And Isabella: phrenology, the gaze And the
social discourse', Art History 14:1 (1991), pp. 51-66.
*R. Cooter, ‘Phrenology: the provocation of progress’, History of Science 14 (1976), pp. 211-34.
*R. Cooter, 'Phrenology and British alienists, c. 1825-1845. Part II: Doctrine and practice', Medical
History, 20 (1976), pp. 135-51.
R. Cooter, 'The conservatism of "pseudoscience",' in P. Grim (ed.), Philosophy of Science and the Occult
(1982), pp. 130-43.
R. Cooter, 'The politics of brain: phrenology in Birmingham', Society for the Social History of Medicine
Bulletin 32 (1983) , pp.34-6.
R. Cooter, The cultural meaning of popular science: phrenology and the organization of consent in
nineteenth-century Britain (1984).
R. Fancher, ‘Francis Galton’s African ethnography and its role in the development of his psychology’,
British Journal for the History of Science 16:1 (1983), pp. 67-79.
E. Fee, 'Nineteenth-century craniology: the study of the female skull', Bulletin of the History of Medicine
53 (1979), pp. 415-33.
D. de Giustino, 'Reforming the Commonwealth of Thieves: British phrenologists and Australia,' Victorian
Studies 15, (1972), pp. 439-461.
D. de Giustino, Conquest of the mind: phrenology and Victorian social thought (1975).
S.J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981), pp. 30-72 and pp. 73-112.
A. Grant, 'New Light On An Old View: Combe's Phrenology And Robert Owen', Journal of the History of
Ideas 29:2 (1968), pp. 293-301.
A. Grant, 'Combe on phrenology and free will: a note on nineteenth-Century Secularism,' Journal of the
History of Ideas 26 (1965), pp. 141-147.
J.Y. Hall, 'Gall's phrenology: a romantic psychology', Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), pp. 305-317.
J.S. Haller, 'Concepts of race inferiority in nineteenth century anthropology', Journal of the History of
Medicine and the Allied Sciences 25 (1970), pp. 40-51.
A. Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: a study in nineteenth-century thought (1987).
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L. Hartley, 'A science for one or a science for all? Physiognomy, self-Help, and the practical benefits of
science', in D. Clifford (ed.), Repositioning Victorian sciences : shifting centres in nineteenth-
century scientific thinking (2006), pp. 71-82, and pp. 226-28.
L. Hartley, Physiognomy and the meaning of expression in nineteenth-century culture (2001).
L.S. Hearnshaw, 'Mesmerism and phrenology,' in his A Short History of British Psychology, 1840-1940
(1964), pp. 15-19.
L.S. Jacyna, ‘The physiology of mind, the unity of nature, and the moral order in Victorian thought’,
British Journal for the History of Science 14:2 (1981), pp. 109-32.
H. Klein, ‘The mechanical age: nineteenth century materialism and the human mind’, in A. Caleb (ed.),
(Re)creating science in nineteenth-century Britain (2007), pp. 188-201.
D. Knight, The age of science: the scientific world-view in the nineteenth century (1986), chapter 5.
T. Leahey, Psychology's Occult Doubles (1983), chapters 3 and 4.
P. Lucie, ‘The sinner and the phrenologist: Davey Haggart meets George Combe’, Journal of Scottish
Historical Studies 27:2 (2007), pp. 125-49.
M. Lynch, ''Here is Adhesiveness": from friendship to homosexuality', Victorian Studies 29 (1985), pp.67-
96.
*A. McLaren, ‘Phrenology: medium and message’, Journal of Modern History 46 (1974), pp. 86-97.
A. Mellor, 'Physiognomy, phrenology and Blake's visionary heads,' in R. N. Essick and D. R. Pearce (eds),
Blake in his Time (1978), pp. 53-74.
R. Nye, 'Sociology and degeneration: the irony of progress,' in J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L.
Gilman (eds), Degeneration, The Dark Side of Progress (1985), pp. 49-71.
T.M. Parssinen, 'Popular science and society: the phrenology movement in early Victorian Britain'.
Journal of Social History 8:1 (1974), pp. 1-20.
G.B. Risse, 'Vocational guidance during the Depression: phrenology versus applied psychology,' Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 12 (1976), pp. 130-40.
J. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000).
S. Shapin, 'Homo Phrenologicus: anthropological perspectives on an historical problem,' in B.S. Barnes
and S. Shapin (eds), Natural order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (1979), pp.41-71.
S. Shapin, 'Phrenological knowledge and the social structure of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh',
Annals of Science 32 (1975), pp. 219-243.
M. Shortland, 'The power of a thousand eyes: Johann Casper Lavater's Science of Physiognomical
Perception,' Criticism 28 (1986), pp. 379-408.
M. Shortland, 'Courting the cerebellum: early organological and phrenological views of sexuality' in
British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987), pp. 173-99.
D. Stack, 'William Lovett and the National Association for the Political and Social Improvement of the
People', Historical Journal 42 (1999), pp. 1027-50.
D. Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the mid-Victorian mind (2008).
J. Strachan, '"The mapp'd out skulls of Scotia": Blackwood's and the Scottish Phrenological Controversy',
in D. Finkelstein (ed.), Print culture and the Blackwood tradition, 1805-1930 (2006), pp. 49-69.
M. Staum, 'Physiognomy and Phrenology at the Paris Athénée', Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995),
pp. 443-462.
J.B. Taylor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied selves: an anthology of psychological texts, 1830-1890
(1998), pp. 8-48.
S. Tomlinson, ‘Phrenology, education and the politics of human nature: the thought and influence of
George Combe’, History of Education 26:1 (1997), pp. 1-22.
S. Tomlinson, Head Masters: phrenology, secular education, and nineteenth-century social thought
(2005).
F.M. Turner, ‘Deviation from natural selection: the phrenological basis’, in his Between Science and
Religion: the reaction to scientific naturalism in late Victorian Britain (1974), pp. 73-84.
A. Wrobel, ‘Orthodoxy and respectability in nineteenth-century phrenology’, Journal of Popular Culture
9 (1975), pp. 38-50.
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J. Van Wyhe, 'The Diffusion of Phrenology through Public Lecturing', in A. Fyfe and B. Lightman (eds),
Science in the Marketplace : Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (2007), pp. 60-96.
J. Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the origins of Victorian scientific naturalism (2004).
J. Van Wyhe, ‘Was phrenology a reform science? Towards a new generalization for phrenology’, History
of Science 42 (2002), pp. 313-331.
J. Van Wyhe, ‘The authority of human nature: the Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall’, British Journal for
the History of Science (2002), pp. 17-42.
You may also wish to browse the website ‘The history of phrenology on the web’:
http://www.historyofphrenology.org.uk/overview.htm
WEEK 8: MESMERISM AND HYPNOSIS
MESMERISM AND HYPNOSIS

Lecture (Wednesday 24 November)
Outline
Like phrenology, mesmerism and hypnotism have often been dismissed as the playthings of cranks and
faddists, but both enjoyed considerable popularity at different points in the nineteenth century.
Mesmerism attracted a great deal of attention in the 1820s, much of it sensational, but many observers
also saw it as a tool to develop and explore the powers of the mind. From the 1840s hypnotism became
more popular as a way of accessing the hidden areas of the mind. Although mesmerism and hypnotism
were popular among novelists and poets, both were dogged by association with the unrespectable
activities of charlatans, and provoked strong fears about the loss of individual free will. This lecture charts
the changing fortunes of mesmerism and hypnotism in the nineteenth century, and explores why it
attracted and repulsed contemporaries in equal measure.
Key questions
- Why were some Victorians attracted to mesmerism and hypnotism?

- Why were mesmerism and hypnotism seen as ‘unrespectable’?
- Why did mesmerism and hypnotism provoke such deep-seated and widespread anxieties?
Key texts
Please read the following TWO items:
R. Cooter, ‘Dichotomy and denial: mesmerism, medicine and Harriet Martineau’, in M. Benjamin (ed.),
Science and sensibility: gender and scientific enquiry, 1780-1945 (1991), pp. 144-73
A. Winter, ‘The social body and the invention of consensus’, in her Mesmerized: powers of mind in
Victorian Britain (1998), pp. 306-43.
Additional reading
Novels
George du Maurier, Trilby (1894).
Histories
M. Davis, 'Incongruous compounds: re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and late-Victorian psychology', Journal
of Victorian Culture 11:2 (2006), pp. 207-25.
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D. Forrest, Hypnotism: a history (1999).
A. Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (1992).
R. Harris, Murders and Madness: medicine, law and society in the fin de siècle (1989).
*C. Hilton, 'Elizabeth Gaskell and mesmerism: an unpublished letter', Medical History 39 (1995), pp. 219-
35.
*F. Kaplan, ''The mesmeric mania': the early Victorians and animal magnetism', Journal of the History of
Ideas 35 (1974), pp. 691-702.
J. Kirkby, Joan. 'Shadows of the Invisible World : Mesmer, Swedenborg and the Spiritualist Sciences', in
C. Knellwolf and J. Goodall (eds), Frankenstein's science: experimentation and discovery in
Romantic culture, 1780-1830 (2008), pp. 99-116.
M.E. Leighton, ‘Under the influence: crime and hypnotic fictions of the fin de siècle’, Costerus 160
(2006), pp. 203-22.
M.E. Leighton. ‘"Hypnosis redivivus": Ernest Hart, the British Medical Journal, and the hypnotism
controversy’, Victorian Periodicals Review 34:2 (2001), pp. 104-27.
J. Miller, ‘Going unconscious’, in R.B. Silvers (ed.), Hidden histories of science (London: Granta, 1997),
pp. 1-35.
T.M. Parssinen, 'Mesmeric performers', Victorian Studies 21:1 (1977), pp. 87-104.
D. Pick, Svengali’s Web: the alien enchanter in modern culture (2000).
*R. Porter, '"Under the influence": mesmerism in England', History Today 35:9 (1985), pp. 22-9.
*D. Postlethwaite, 'Mothering and mesmerism in the life of Harriet Martineau', Signs 14 (1989), pp. 583-
609.
N. Roberts, ‘Character in the mind: citizenship, education and psychology in Britain, 1880-1914’, History
of Education 33:2 (2004), pp. 177-97.
V.L. Ryan, ‘Reading the Mind : from George Eliot's fiction to James Sully's psychology’, Journal of the
History of Ideas 70:4 (2009), pp. 615-35.
R. Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880 (2000).
S. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996).
S, Shuttleworth, ‘The malady of thought: embodied memory in Victorian psychology and the novel’, M.
Campbell, J.M. Labbe and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Memory and Memorials 1789-1914: literary and
cultural perspectives (2000), pp. 46-59.
R. Smith, ‘The physiology of the will: mind, body, and psychology in the periodical literature, 1855-
1875’, in G. Cantor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Science serialized: representations of the sciences in
nineteenth-century periodicals (2004), pp. 81-110.
(1998), pp. 49-64.
G. Taylor, 'Svengali : mesmerist and aesthete', in R. Foulkes (ed.), British theatre in the 1890s (1992), pp.
93-110.
I. Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (1965), ch. 10, 'From Mesmerism to Hypnotism'.
M. Willis, Mesmerists, monsters, and machines: science fiction and the cultures of science in the
nineteenth century (2006).
*A. Winter, 'Ethereal epidemic: mesmerism and the introduction of inhalation anaesthesia to early
Victorian London', Social History of Medicine 4 (1991), pp. 1-27.
WEEK 9: DEVIANCY AND DEGENERATION
DEGENERATION
Lecture (Wednesday 1 December)
Outline
The Victorian era was lauded as the ‘Age of Progress’, but there was a dark underside to modernity.
Darwinism raised the awful prospect that if humans had evolved from animal origins, under the wrong
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influences they might also regress or degenerate. In the late nineteenth century, fears of hereditary
degeneration spread throughout society, to the extent that Daniel Pick has referred to these anxieties as a
‘European disorder’. This lecture explores the causes of fears of degeneration, what was meant by the
concept, its influence in medicine and culture, and why degeneration seemed applicable to so many
spheres of life.
Key texts
G.S. Jones, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (1971), pp.
281-314.
J. Saunders, ‘Quarantining the weak-minded: psychiatric definitions of degeneracy and the late-Victorian
asylum’, in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness Vol. 3.
Additional reading
Novels
R.L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895).
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Histories
S. Arata, 'The Occidental Tourist : Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization', Victorian Studies
33:4 (1990), pp. 621-45.
*R. Barnett, 'Education or degeneration : E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The outline of history'.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37:2 (2006), pp. 203-29.
B. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Britain (1986), pp. 333-351.
R. Edmond, 'Home and away: degeneration in imperialist and modernist discourse', in H. Booth and N.
Rigby (eds), Modernism and empire (2000), pp. 39-63.
L. Hamilton, 'New women and "old" men: gendering degeneration', in T. Schaffer and K. Psomiades
(eds), Women and British aestheticism (1999), pp. 62-80.
*Vanessa Heggie, ‘Lies, damn lies, and Manchester’s recruiting statistics: degeneration as an “urban
legend” in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences 63:2 (2008), pp. 178-216.
K. Hurley, The Gothic Body: sexuality, materialism and degeneration at the fin de siècle (2004).
S. Ledger, ‘In darkest England: the terror of degeneration in fin de siecle England’, Literature and History
4:2 (1995), pp .71-86.
*B. Luckin, ‘Revisiting the idea of degeneration in urban Britain, 1830-1900’, Urban History 33 (2006),
pp. 234-252.
R.C. Olby, ‘Constitutional and hereditary disorders’, in W.F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Companion
J. Oppenheim, ‘Nervous degeneration’ in her “Shattered Nerves”: doctors, patients, and depression in
Victorian England (1991), pp. 265-92.
L. Otis, Membranes: metaphors of invasion in nineteenth-century literature, science, and politics (1999).
D. Pick, ‘“Terrors of the Night”: Dracula and ‘degeneration’ in the late nineteenth century’, Critical
Quarterly 30 (1988), pp. 71-87.
D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (1989).
R. Porter, ‘Diseases of civilization’, in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History
of Medicine, Vol. 1 (1993), pp. 585-602.
D. Porter, '"Enemies of the race": biologism, environmentalism, and public health in Edwardian England',
Victorian Studies, 34 (1991), pp. 159-78.
E. Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac (1997), pp. 69-112.
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E. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: gender and culture at the fin-de-siecle (1990).
*K. Spencer, ‘Purity and danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the late Victorian degeneracy crisis’,
ELH 59:1 (Spring 1992), pp. 197-225.
(1998), pp. 287-292 and pp. 303-321.
J.B. Taylor, 'Psychology at the fin de siècle', in G. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge companion to the fin de
siècle (2007), pp. 13-30.
T. Turner, ‘The early 1900s and before …’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp. 3-29.
CRIME AND PSYCHIATRY

Seminar (Thursday 2 December)
Outline
Theories of degeneration seemed to provide a “scientific” explanation for many social problems. The
influence of these theories provides an excellent case study of how the authority of science and medicine
can be invoked to support existing social prejudices. In this seminar, and in the session next week on
sexology, we will consider diagnoses of deviancy in relation to crime and sexuality. The focus throughout
will be on the social construction of psychiatric categories on the late nineteenth century, and measuring
the impact of theories of degeneration outside the asylum.
Key questions
- Why was criminal behaviour seen as evidence of degeneration?

- Did theories of crime and degeneration simply dress up existing prejudices in new language?
- What influence did theories of degeneration have on criminal policy?
Key texts
Please read the following TWO items:
Extract from F. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), reprinted in J.B.
Taylor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), ‘Heredity, degeneration, and modern life’, in their (edited)
Embodied selves: an anthology of psychological texts, 1830-1890 (1998), pp. 330-32.
D. Pick, ‘Crime, urban degeneration and national decadence’, in his Faces of Degeneration: a European
disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (1989), pp. 176-221.
NOTE: We will discuss the Galton extract in detail in the seminar, so please make sure you have read and
made notes on this text.
Additional reading
V. Bailey, 'The Metropolitan Police, the Home Office and the threat of outcast London in 1886', in V.
Bailey (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (1981).
P. Becker and R. Wetzell (eds), Criminals and their scientists: the history of criminology in international
perspective (2006).
P. Beirne, ‘Heredity versus environment: a reconsideration of Charles Goring's The English Convict
(1913)’, British Journal of Criminology 28:3 (1998), pp. 315-59.
N. Davie, Tracing the criminal: the rise of scientific criminology in Britain, 1860-1918 (2006).
N. Davie, ‘Criminal man revisited? Continuity and change in British criminology, c.1865-1918’, Journal
of Victorian Culture 8:1 (2003), pp. 1-32.
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J. Davis, 'From "rookeries" to "communities": race, poverty and policing in London, 1850-1985', History
Workshop Journal 27 (1989).
C. Elmsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (4th edn 2010).
M. Fitzgerald et al (eds), Crime and Society: Readings in History and Theory (1981).
D. Garland, ‘British criminology before 1935’, British Journal of Criminology 28:2 (1988), pp. 1-17.
D. Garland, Punishment and welfare: a history of penal strategies (1985).
M. Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the origins of biological criminology (2002).
S. Gilman and R. Chamberlin (eds), Degeneration: the dark side of progress (1985).
B. Godfrey and P. Laurence, Crime and Justice, 1750-1950 (2005).
S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981).
M. Harris, ‘Social diseases? Crime and medicine in the Victorian press’, in W.F. Bynum, S. Lock, and R.
Porter (eds), Medical journals and medical knowledge: historical essays (1992), pp. 108-25.
A. Joseph, ‘Anthropometry, the police expert, and the Deptford murders: the contested introduction of
fingerprinting for the identification of criminals in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in J.
Caplan and J. Torpey, Documenting individual identity: the development of state practices in the
modern world (2001), pp. 164-83.
B. Kelly, ‘Poverty, crime and mental illness: female forensic psychiatric committal in Ireland, 1910–
1948’, Social History of Medicine 21:2 (2008), pp. 311-28.
P. Knepper, ‘British Jews and the racialisation of crime in the age of empire’, British Journal of
Criminology 47:1 (2007), pp. 61-79.
M-C. Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: the production of deviance in nineteenth-century discourse
(1992).
I. Loader, ‘Fall of the 'platonic guardians': liberalism, criminology and political responses to crime in
England and Wales’, British Journal of Criminology 46:4 (2006), pp. 561-86.
H. Mannheim (ed.) Pioneers in Criminology (1960).
R. Nye, 'The rise and fall of the eugenics empire: recent perspectives on the impact of biomedical thought
in modern society', Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 687-700.
C. Shaw, 'Eliminating the Yahoo - eugenics, Social Darwinism and five Fabians', History of Political
Thought 8 (1987), pp. 521-44.
H. Shore, ‘Punishment, reformation, or welfare: responses to 'the problem' of juvenile crime in Victorian
and Edwardian Britain’, in H. Johnston (ed.), Punishment and control in historical perspective
(2008), pp. 158-76.
R. Smith, Trial By Medicine: insanity and responsibility in Victorian trials (1981), pp. 34-66.
A. Scull, ‘Psychiatry and social control in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, History of Psychiatry 2
(1991), pp. 149-169.
T. Ward, 'An honourable regime of truth? Foucault, psychiatry and English criminal justice', in H.
Johnston (ed.), Punishment and control in historical perspective (2008), pp. 56-74.
M. Wiener, An empire on trial: race, murder, and justice under British rule, 1870-1935 (2009).
M. Wiener, Reconstructing the criminal: culture, law and policy in England, 1830-1914 (1990).
S. Watson, ‘Malingerers, the “weakminded” criminal and the “moral imbecile”: how the English prison
medical officer became an expert in mental deficiency, 1880-1930’, in M. Clark and C. Crawford
(eds), Legal Medicine in History (1994), pp. 223-44.
WEEK 10: DEVIANCY AND DEGENERATION
SEXOLOGY
Seminar (Wednesday 8 December)
Outline
In this session, which will be divided between a short lecture and a class discussion, we will continue to
consider the uses of psychiatry and medicine to categorise ‘deviancy’. The late nineteenth century saw the
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invention of sexology, a new ‘science’ which sought to document, classify, and explain human sexual
behaviour. Scientists and doctors involved in the study of sexual behaviour did not simply document
sexual behaviour: as they selected those aspects of sexuality which were to be defined as problematic or
pathological, they also constructed ideals of gender and sexuality, and their judgments were used to
support notions of ‘cure’ or punishment for sexual misdemeanours.
Key questions
- Why was sex seen as a legitimate area for medical intervention?

- What was new about the approach of sexology to understanding sexual behaviour?
- How did sexology incorporate ideas of degeneration?
Key texts
H. Rimke and A. Hunt, ‘From sinners to degenerates: the medicalisation of morality in the nineteenth
century’, History of the Human Sciences 15:1 (2002), pp. 59-89.
C. Waters, ‘Sexology’, in H.G. Cocks and M. Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History
of Sexuality (2006), pp. 41-63.
Sexology
H. Bauer, ‘Scholars, scientists and sexual inverts: authority and sexology in nineteenth-century Britain’, in
D. Clifford (ed.), Repositioning Victorian sciences: shifting centres in nineteenth-century scientific
thinking (2006), pp. 197-247.
J. Bristow, Sexuality (1997), pp. 1-83.
J. Bristow, ‘Symond’s history, Ellis’s heredity: Sexual Inversion’, in L. Bland and L. Doan (eds),
Sexology in Culture: labelling bodies and desires (1998), pp. 79-99.
I. Crozier, 'Taking prisoners: Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and the construction of homosexuality,
1897-1951', Social History of Medicine 13:3 (2000), pp. 447-66.
R. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment (1991).
M.S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (1997).
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction (1981).
L. Hall, 'Sexuality', in C. Williams (ed.), A companion to nineteenth-century Britain (2004), pp. 430-42.
L. Hall, ''The English have hot-water bottles': the morganatic marriage between medicine and sexology in
Britain since William Acton', in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), Sexual knowledge, sexual science:
the history of attitudes to sexuality (1994), pp. 350-66.
K. Hurley, The Gothic Body: sexuality, materialism and degeneration at the fin de siècle (2004).
S. Ledger and S. McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (1995).
F. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics since 1830 (1987).
R. Porter and L. Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (1995),
pp. 132-77.
R. Porter and M Teich (eds). Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality
(1994).
D. Pick, ‘The degenerating genius of the fin de siècle’, History Today 42 (1992), pp. 17 – 22.
J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: the regulation of sexuality since 1800 (2nd edn, 1989), pp. 141-159.
Primary sources
L. Bland and L. Doan (eds). Sexology Uncensored: the Documents of Sexual Science (1998).
S. Jeffreys, The Sexuality Debates (1977).
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S. Ledger and R. Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: a reader in cultural history, c.1880-1900 (2000), pp. 1-24
and pp. 291-314.
WEEK 11: VOICES OF MADNESS
UNCOVERING MADNESS
Lecture (Wednesday 15 December)
Outline
This lecture explores some of the main difficulties associated with researching and writing the histories of
psychiatry, psychology, and madness. It will draw on topics and case studies previously studied on the
module in order to illustrate some of these problems and the ways in which historians have ignored,
confronted, and creatively responded to them
Key questions
- What are the differences between the history of psychiatry, the history of psychology, and the
history of madness?
- Are the problems associated with studying the histories of psychiatry, psychology and madness
particularly different to those experienced when studying other historical topics?
- How have historians’ approaches to psychiatry, psychology, and madness changed in recent
decades?
Key texts
*R. Porter, ‘The patient’s view: doing medical history from below’, Theory and Society 14:2 (1985), pp.
175-198.
Additional reading
Please see the reading for the essay workshop on Voices of Madness.
VOICES OF MADNESS
Essay workshop (Thursday 16 December)
Outline
This is a practical workshop designed to help you with the module essay assignment, which looks at
planning, researching, structuring, and writing essays. We will examine essay writing through planning
how you would approach the following essay question on ‘voices of madness’:
To what extent is it possible to include the subjective experience of nineteenth-century mental

patients when writing the history of madness?
It may be useful to note that this question is taken from the set essay questions.
In the workshop we will also examine the types of sources historians have used to understand the
experience of madness, including asylum records, patient case notes, and letters. We will assess the value
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of different types of sources, and discuss the difficulties of accessing the voice of the mad. To prepare for
the workshop, it will be useful to consider the following questions:
- What types of sources have historians used to try to understand the experience of madness?
- What are the main advantages and disadvantages of these sources?
- Is it possible for the historian to access the ‘authentic’ voice of the mad?
Key texts
*J. Andrews, 'Case notes, case histories, and the patient's experience of insanity at Garnavel Royal
Asylum, Glasgow, in the nineteenth century', Social History of Medicine 11 (1998), pp. 255-82.
[CP] A. Beveridge, 'Life in the asylum: patients' letters from Morningside, 1873-1908', History of
Psychiatry 9 (1998), pp. 431-69.
*L. Smith, '"Your Very Thankful Inmate": Discovering the Patients of an Early County Lunatic Asylum',
Social History of Medicine 21:2 (2008), pp. 237-52.
[CP] A. Suzuki, 'Framing psychiatric subjectivity: doctor, patient and record-keeping at Bethlem in the
nineteenth century', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, institutions, and society, 1800-
1914 : a social history of madness in comparative perspective (1999), pp. 115-135.
Additional reading
Uncovering patient history
*F. Condrau, 'The patient’s view meets the clinical gaze', Social History of Medicine 20:3 (2007), pp. 525-
40.
A. Digby, ‘The patient’s view’ in I. Loudon (ed.), Western Medicine: an illustrated history (1997), pp.
291-305
*J. Gillis, 'The history of the patient history since 1850', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80:3 (2006),
pp. 490-512.
*G.B. Risse and J.H. Warner, 'Reconstructing clinical activities: patient records in medical history'. Social
History of Medicine 5:2 (1992), pp. 183-205.
Voices of the mad
* P. Allderidge, ‘Richard Dadd (1817-1886): poet and painter’, Medical History 14:3 (1970), pp. 308-313.
M. Barfoot and A. Beveridge, '“Our Most Notable Inmate”: John Willis Mason at the
Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1864- 1901', History of Psychiatry 4 (1993), pp. 159-208.
*P. Bartlett, 'The asylum, the workhouse, and the voice of the insane poor in 19th-century England',
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 21:4 (1998), pp. 421-32.
A. Beveridge and M. Williams, ‘Inside “the lunatic manufacturing company”: the persecuted world of
John Gilmour’, History of Psychiatry 13 (2002), pp. 19-49.
C. Colebourne, ‘Hearing the voices of the excluded: re-examining “madness” in history’, in J. Damousi
and R. Reynolds (eds), History on the Couch: essays in history and psychoanalysis (2003).
*K. Davies, ‘“Silent and censured travellers?” Patients’ narratives and patients’ voice: perspectives on the
history of madness since 1948’, Social History of Medicine 14:2 (2001), pp. 267-292.
G. Davis, ‘Some historical uses of clinical psychiatric records’, Scottish Archives 11 (2005), pp. 26-36.
*E. Jones and S. Rahman, 'Framing Mental Illness, 1923-1939: The Maudsley Hospital and its Patients',
Social History of Medicine 21:1 (2008), pp. 107-25.
J. Geller and M. Harris (eds.) Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls, 1840-1945 (1994).
D. Gittins, Madness in its Place: narratives of Severalls Hospital, 1913-1997 (1998).
*K. Hodgkin, ‘The labyrinth and the pit’, History Workshop Journal 51 (2001), pp. 37-63.
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P.M. Logan, Nerves and narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose
(1997).
H. Meek, 'Medical women and hysterical doctors: interpreting hysteria's symptoms in eighteenth-century
Britain', in G. Colburn (ed.), The English malady: enabling and disabling fictions (2008), 223-47.
J. Melling, '"Buried alive by her friends": asylum narratives and the English governess, 1845-1914', in P.
Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental illness and learning disability since 1850 : finding a place for
mental disorder in the United Kingdom (2006), pp. 65-90.
R. Porter, A social history of madness: stories of the insane (1987).
R. Porter, ‘The voice of the mad’ in his Mind-Forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the
Restoration to the Regency (1987), pp. 229-73
*D. Wright, ‘Getting out of the asylum: understanding the confinement of the insane in the nineteenth
century’, Social History of Medicine 10:1 (1997), pp. 137-155.
Images of the mad
J. Browne, ‘Darwin and the face of madness’ in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of
Madness, Vol. 3.
*J. Ellenbogen, 'Authority, objectivity, evidence : scientific photography in Victorian Britain', Studies in
History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 39:1 (2008), pp. 171-75.
S.L. Gilman, 'Darwin sees the insane', Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 15 (1979), pp.
253-62.
*M. Jackson, 'Images of deviance : visual representations of mental defectives in early twentieth-century
medical texts', British Journal for the History of Science 28:3 (1995), pp. 319-37.
*J.E. Kromm, ‘The feminization of madness in visual representation’, Feminist Studies 20 (1994), pp.
504-35
M. Pickering and E. Keightley, 'See Hear: phonography and photography as forms of historical
representation', in S. Nicholas, T. O'Malley and K. Williams (eds), Reconstructing the past: history
in the mass media 1890-2005 (2007).
J. Tucker, 'Gender and genre in Victorian scientific photography', in A.B. Shteir and B. Lightman (eds),
Figuring it out: science, gender, and visual culture (2006), pp. 140-63.
J. Tucker, Nature exposed: photography as eyewitness in Victorian science (2005).
J. Tucker, 'Photography as witness, detective, and imposter: visual representation in Victorian science', in
B. Lightman (ed.), Victorian science in context (1997), pp. 378-408.
******CHRISTMAS******
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BLOCK 3: MODERN MADNESS
This block focuses on psychiatry, psychology, and changing attitudes towards madness in the first half of
the twentieth century. It examines new ways of conceptualising mind and its disorders; shifts in methods
of treatment, including the spread of psychoanalysis; the impact of the two world wars on understandings
of mental illness; and representations of madness on film.
GENERAL READING
Psychology
M. Roiser, 'Social psychology and social concern in 1930s Britain', in G. Bunn, A. Lovie, and G. Richards
(eds), Psychology in Britain : historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp. 169-87.
N. Rose, The Psychological Complex: psychology, politics and society in England, 1869-1939 (1985).
*G. Sutherland and S. Sharp, '"The first official psychologist in the world": aspects of the
professionalization of psychology in early twentieth century Britain', History of Science, 18 (1980),
pp. 181-208.
M. Thomson, ‘The psychological body’ in Cooter and Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the
M. Thomson, ‘“Savage civilisation”: race, culture and mind in Britain, 1898-1939’ in W. Ernst and B.
Harris (eds), Race, science and medicine, 1700-1960 (1999), pp. 235-58.
M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and health in twentieth-century Britain (2006)
Psychoanalysis
S. Alexander, ‘Feminist history and psychoanalysis’, in her Becoming A Woman and other essays in
nineteenth and twentieth century feminist history (1994), pp. 225-30.
A. Clare, ‘Freud’s cases: the clinical basis of psychoanalysis’ in Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), The
Anatomy of Madness Vol. 1.
C. Colebourne, ‘Hearing the voices of the excluded: re-examining “madness” in history’, in J. Damousi
and R. Reynolds (eds), History on the Couch: essays in history and psychoanalysis (2003).
J. Forrester, ‘Contracting the disease of love: authority and freedom in the origins of psychoanalysis’, in
Bynum, Porter and Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. 1.
*J. Forrester, 'Remembering and Forgetting Freud in Early Twentieth-Century Dreams'. Science in
Context 19:1 (2006), pp. 65-85.
H. Small and T. Tate (eds), Literature, science, psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: essays in honour of Gillian
Beer (2003).
E. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: a social and cultural history of psychoanalysis (2004).
Psychiatry
R.D. Hinshelwood, 'Psychodynamic psychiatry before World War I', in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman
(eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991), pp. 197-206.
M. Pines, 'The development of the psychodynamic movement', in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150
years of British psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991), pp. 206-31.
*G. Swanson, 'Serenity, Self-regard and the Genetic Sequence: Social Psychiatry and Preventive Eugenics
in Britain, 1930s-1950s', New Formations 60 (2007), pp. 50-65.
L. Westwood, 'Separatism and exclusion: women in psychiatry, 1900-1950', in P. Dale, and J. Melling
(eds), Mental illness and learning disability since 1850: finding a place for mental disorder in the
United Kingdom (2006), pp. 91-111.
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Clinics, hospitals, and practices
P. Allderidge, 'The foundation of the Maudsley hospital', in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years
of British psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991), pp. 79-88.
J. Busfield, ‘Restructuring mental health services in twentieth century Britain’, in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and
R. Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health in postwar Britain and the Netherlands
(Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
M. Derksen, 'Science in the clinic: clinical psychology at the Maudsley', in G. Bunn, A. Lovie, and G.
Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain: historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp. 267-89.
S. Gilman, ‘Psychotherapy’ in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of
Medicine, Vol 2, pp. 1029-49.
*E. Jones, 'Aubrey Lewis, Edward Mapother and the Maudsley', Medical History 22 (2003), pp. 3-38.
D. Parfitt, 'A mental hospital in 1929', in H. Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years of British
psychiatry. Vol. 2: the aftermath (1996), pp. 465-78.
*A. Walk, 'Medico-psychologists, Maudsley and the Maudsley', British Journal of Psychiatry 128 (1976),
pp. 19-30.
WEEK 1: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ITS DISCONTENTS
THE FREUDIAN CENTURY?

Lecture (Wednesday 2 February)
Outline
The twentieth century has been described as ‘the Freudian century’, reflecting the enormous influence of
psychoanalysis on conceptualising the mind and its disorders. Older histories of British psychology and
psychiatry viewed the early twentieth century as a period which witnessed the inevitable onward march of
Freudian psychology, the discrediting of the asylum, and the rejection of materialist approaches to mind.
Yet while Freudian psychoanalysis was certainly extremely influential, these histories may have
overstated its success in the early parts of the century. This lecture provides a brief introduction to some of
the key concepts in psychoanalysis, its early history in Britain, and explores why it has been seen as such
a radically different approach to understanding the mind.
Key questions
- What were the key concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis?

- How was psychoanalysis different from previous understandings of mind?
- Was the twentieth century really ‘the Freudian century’?
Key texts
S. Shamdasani, ‘The psychoanalytic body’ in Cooter and Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the
M. Stanton, ‘The emergence of psychoanalysis’ and ‘Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A
Century of Psychiatry, pp. 41-9.
Additional reading
Introductions to psychoanalysis
P. Gay, Freud for Historians (1985).

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P. Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader (1995).
R. Osborne, Freud for Beginners (1993).
A. Storr, Freud: a very short introduction (1989).
Psychoanalysis: early history and influence
J. Forrester, ‘“A whole climate of opinion”: rewriting the history of psychoanalysis’, in M. Micale and R.
Porter (eds), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (1994). Reprinted in J. Forrester, Dispatches
from the Freud Wars: psychoanalysis and its passions (1997), pp. 184-207.
S.W. Jackson, Care of the Psyche: a history of psychological healing (1999).
R. Porter, ‘The century of psychoanalysis?’ in his Madness: a brief history (2002), pp. 183-214.
E. Showalter, ‘Women and psychiatric modernism’ in her The Female Malady: women, madness and
English culture 1830-1980 (1987), pp. 195-219.
E. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: a social and cultural history of psychoanalysis (2004).
PSYCHOANALYSIS IN BRITAIN
Seminar (Wednesday 3 February)
Outline
This seminar explores further the impact of psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century,
examining the dissemination of Freudian ideas, reactions to psychoanalysis, and the popularity of
alternative forms of psychology.
Key questions
- Among which groups or individuals was psychoanalysis popular?

- What other types of psychology were available to early twentieth-century Britons?
- How should we measure the success or failure of psychoanalysis at this time?
Key texts
Please read at least TWO of the following:
*S. Raitt, 'Early British psychoanalysis and the Medico-Psychological Clinic', History Workshop Journal
58:1 (2004), pp. 63-85.
*G. Richards, 'Britain on the couch: the popularization of psychoanalysis in Britain, 1918-1940', Science
in Context 13:2 (2000), pp. 183-230.
M. Thomson, 'The popular, the practical and the professional: psychological identities in Britain, 1901-
1950', in G. Bunn, A. Lovie and G. Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain : historical essays and
personal reflections (2001), pp. 115-32.
Additional reading
Dissemination and reception of Freud
*S. Alexander, 'Psychoanalysis in Britain in the early twentieth century: an introductory note'., History
Workshop Journal 45 (1998), pp. 135-43.
*R. Bocock, 'British sociologists and Freud : a sociological analysis of the absence of a relationship',
British Journal of Sociology 32 (1981), pp. 346-61.
*B. Caine, 'The Stracheys and psychoanalysis', History Workshop Journal 45 (1998), pp. 144-69.
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*L. Cameron and J. Forrester, '"A nice type of the English scientist": Tansley and Freud', History
Workshop Journal 48 (1999), pp. 64-100.
*J. Forrester, ‘Freud in Cambridge’, Critical Quarterly 46:2 (July 2004), pp. 1-26.
G. Kohon (ed.), The British school of psychoanalysis: the independent tradition (1986).
*D. Rapp, 'The early discovery of Freud by the British general educated public, 1912-1919', Social
History of Medicine 3 (1990), pp. 217-43.
D. Rapp, ‘The reception of Freud by the British press: general interest and literary magazines, 1920-
1925’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24 (1988), pp. 191-201.
T. Turner, 'James Crichton-Browne and the anti-psychoanalysts', in H. Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds),
150 years of British psychiatry. Vol. 2 : the aftermath (1996), pp. 144-55.
Alternative psychologies
R. Hayward, 'From Clever Hans to Michael Balint: emotion, influence and the unconscious in British
medical practice', in F.B. Alberti (ed.), Medicine, emotion and disease, 1700-1950 (2006), pp. 144-
68.
J. Miller, ‘Going unconscious’, in R.B. Silvers (ed.), Hidden histories of science (London: Granta, 1997),
pp. 1-35.
J. Sayers, 'British psychology and psychoanalysis: the case of Susan Isaacs', G. Bunn, A. Lovie and G.
Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain: historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp. 205-22.
J.B. Taylor, ‘Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious’, in J.B. Bullen (ed.), Writing and
Victorianism (1997), pp. 137-79.
M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and health in twentieth-century Britain (2006),
Part 1.
M. Thomson, 'Psychology and the "consciousness of modernity" in early twentieth-century Britain', in M.
Daunton and B. Rieger (eds), Meanings of modernity: Britain from the late-Victorian era to World
War II (2001), pp. 97-115.
*E.R. Valentine, ‘“A brilliant and many-sided personality”: Jessie Margaret Murray, founder of the
Medico-Psychological Clinic’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45:2 (Spring
2009), pp. 145-161.
*A. Vrettos, 'Displaced memories in Victorian fiction and psychology', Victorian Studies, 49:2 (2006), pp.
199-207.
*L. Westwood, 'A quiet revolution in Brighton: Dr. Helen Boyle's pioneering approach to mental health
care, 1899-1939', Social History of Medicine 14:3 (2001), pp. 439-57.
WEEK 2: TRAUMA AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
TRAUMA AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Outline
This lecture provides an overview of changing attitudes towards trauma in the First World War, and
places the problem of ‘shell-shock’ in the broader context of changes in twentieth century warfare. It
examines the problems trauma raises for military doctors, the ways in which psychiatrists and
psychologists responded to trauma, and (briefly) the differences between responses in the First and
Second World War. This lecture should be viewed as a springboard for the presentations in the following
week.
Key questions
- Why has war trauma attracted so much attention in the twentieth century?
- What problems has war trauma posed for doctors?
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- To what extent did experiences of trauma in the world wars change the practice of psychiatry?
Key text
J. Bourke, 'Psychology at war, 1914-1945', in G. Bunn, A. Lovie and G. Richards (eds), Psychology in
Britain: historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp. 133-49.
NOTE: You must also begin reading and preparing for your presentation in Week 3.
Additional reading
Please also see the separate reading lists on trauma and the First World War for Week 3.
M. Barrett, Casualty figures: how five men survived the First World War (2007).
H. Binneveld, From shell shock to combat stress: a comparative history of military psychiatry (1997).
E. Jones and S. Wessely, Shell shock to PTSD: military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (2005).
B. Shephard, ‘Shell-shock’, in H. Freeman (ed.), A century of psychiatry (1999), pp. 33-40.
B. Shephard, A war of nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (London: Pimlico, 2002)
B. Shephard, ‘“The early treatment of mental disorders”: R.G. Rows and Maghull 1914-1918’, in H.
Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, volume 2: the aftermath (1996),
pp. 434-64.
*J. Talbot, 'Soldiers, psychiatrists, and combat trauma', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27 (1997),
pp. 437-54.
WEEK 3: TRAUMA AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR PRESENTATIONS
PRESENTATIONS: SHELL-SHOCK, PSYCHOLOGY, AND PSYCHIATRY

Presentations (Wednesday16 February)
Outline
Three groups will present for between 7-10 minutes, answering one of the presentation questions below.
There will be 5 minutes for questions after each presentation.
The aim of these presentations is to make you think critically about different aspects of the question and
the topic. You should read around the topic to answer the question, but also use the advice given in the
essay workshop on interrogating the question to assess what you are being asked to do. Also, try to put
your answer to the presentation in the context of the entire module where possible – how does shell-shock
relate to the history of psychoanalysis, degeneration, or treatments in the asylum, for example? If possible,
think about how and why different historians may have approached the topic you are dealing with in
different ways. How does this affect the history that they write, and how can this be incorporated into your
presentation? Above all, please DO NOT repeat substantial amounts of material from the lecture in your
presentation.
Presentation questions
1. What was shell-shock, and what caused it?

2. Outline and assess the significance of the main methods of treatment of shell-shock.
3. Did shell-shock cause a revolution in psychiatry?
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Reading
Please see me for more detailed advice on reading for each topic. I can also lend students some items
which may be difficult to find.
The experience and treatment of ‘shell shock’
*T. Bogacz, ‘War neurosis and cultural change in England, 1914-22: the work of the War Office
Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-shock”’, Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989), pp. 227-56.
E. Jones, 'Doctors and trauma in the First World War: the response of British military psychiatrists', in P.
Gray and K. Oliver (eds), The memory of catastrophe (2004), pp. 91-105.
E. Jones and S. Wessely, Shell shock to PTSD: military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (2005),
chapters 2 and 9.
E. Leed, No man’s land: combat and identity in World War One (1979), pp. 163-192.
P. Leese, ‘“Why are they not cured? British shellshock treatment during the Great War’ in M. Micale and
P. Lerner (eds), Traumatic pasts: history, psychiatry and trauma in the modern age, 1870-1930
(2001), pp. 205-21.
P. Leese, Shell shock: traumatic neurosis and the British soldiers of the First World War (2002),
especially chapter 5.
H. Merskey, ‘Shell-shock’ in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, 1841-
1991 (1991), pp. 245-6.
M. Roper, The Secret Battle: emotional survival in the Great War (2009), pp. 243-75.
B. Shephard, ‘Shell-shock’, in H. Freeman (ed.), A century of psychiatry (1999), pp. 33-40.
B. Shephard, A war of nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (2002), especially chapters 2-6 and 8.
K. Simpson, ‘Dr. James Dunn and shell-shock’, in H. Cecil and P. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: the
First World War experienced (1996), pp. 502-20.
A. Watson, Enduring the Great War: combat, morale and collapse in the British and German armies,
1914-1918 (2008), chapters 2-3.
A. Watson, ‘Self-deception and survival: mental coping strategies on the Western Front, 1914-1918’,
Journal of Contemporary History 41:2 (2006), pp. 247-68.
Shell shock and British psychiatry
E. Jones, 'Doctors and trauma in the First World War: the response of British military psychiatrists', in P.
Gray and K. Oliver (eds), The memory of catastrophe (2004), pp. 91-105.
E. Jones and S. Wessely, 'The impact of total war on the practice of British psychiatry', in R. Chickering
and S. Förster (eds), The shadows of total war : Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919-
1939 (2003), pp. 129-48.
E. Jones and S. Wessely, Shell shock to PTSD: military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (2005),
especially chapter 3.
P. Leese, ‘“Why are they not cured? British shellshock treatment during the Great War’ in M. Micale and
P. Lerner (eds), Traumatic pasts: history, psychiatry and trauma in the modern age, 1870-1930
(2001), pp. 205-21.
P. Leese, Shell shock: traumatic neurosis and the British soldiers of the First World War (2002),
especially chapters 8 and 9.
*P. Leese, ‘Problems returning home: the British psychological casualties of the Great War’, Historical
Journal 40 (1997), pp. 1055-67.
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*T. Loughran, ‘Shell-shock and psychological medicine in First World War Britain’, Social History of
Medicine 22:1 (April 2009), pp. 79-95.
H. Merskey, ‘Shell-shock’ in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, 1841-
1991 (1991), pp. 245-67.
B. Shephard, ‘“The early treatment of mental disorders”: R.G. Rows and Maghull 1914-1918’, in H.
Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, volume 2: the aftermath (1996),
pp. 434-64.
B. Shephard, A war of nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (2002), especially chapters 10 and
11.
M. Stone, ‘Shellshock and the psychologists’ in W.F. Bynum, R. Porter and M. Shepherd (eds), The
anatomy of madness: essays in the history of psychiatry. Volume 1: people and ideas (1985), pp.
242-71.
M. Thomson, ‘Status, manpower and mental fitness: mental deficiency in the First World War’, in R.
Cooter, M. Harrison and S. Sturdy (eds), War, medicine and modernity (1998), pp. 149-66.
PRESENTATIONS: SHELL-SHOCK, GENDER, CULTURE AND

HISTORY
Presentations (Thursday 17 February)
Outline
Three groups will present for between 7-10 minutes, answering one of the presentation questions below.
There will be 5 minutes for questions after each presentation.
Please DO NOT repeat substantial amounts of material from the lecture in your presentation.
Presentation questions
1. Was shell-shock an ‘epidemic of male hysteria’?

2. Did the experience of shell-shock cause a general shift in attitudes towards mental illness?
3. What kinds of primary sources have historians used to study the history of shell-shock, and what
are the advantages and disadvantages of these sources?
Reading
Please see me for more detailed advice on reading for each topic. I can also lend students some items
which may be difficult to find.
Gender and shell shock
*J. Bourke, ‘Effeminacy, ethnicity, and the end of trauma: the sufferings of “shell-shocked” men in Great
Britain and Ireland, 1914-39’, Journal of Contemporary History 35:1 (2000), pp. 57-69.
J. Bourke, ‘Shell-shock, psychiatry and the Irish soldier during the First World War’, in A. Gregory and S.
Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘a war to unite us all?’ (2002), pp. 155-70.
J. Bourke, Dismembering the male: men’s bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996).
[BB] J. Busfield, ‘Class and gender in twentieth-century British psychiatry: shell-shock and psychopathic
disorder’, in J. Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and seclusion, class and custody: perspectives on
gender and class in the history of British and Irish psychiatry (2004), pp. 295-322.
J. Meyer, ‘“Gladder to be going out than afraid”: shellshock and heroic masculinity in Britain, 1914-
1919’, in J. Macleod and P. Purseigle, Uncovered fields: perspectives in First World War studies
(2004), pp. 195-210.
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*J. Meyer, ‘Separating the men from the boys: masculinity and maturity in understandings of shell shock
in Britain’, 20th Century British History 20:1 (2009).
*M. Roper, ‘Between manliness and masculinity: the “war generation” and the psychology of fear in
Britain, 1914-1950’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), pp. 343-63.
E. Showalter, ‘Rivers and Sassoon: the inscription of male gender anxieties’ in M. Higgonet et al, Behind
the lines: gender and the two World Wars (1987), pp. 61-9.
E. Showalter, The female malady: women, madness and English culture, 1830-1980 (1987), pp. 167-194.
L. Stryker, ‘Mental cases: British shellshock and the politics of interpretation’ in G. Braybon (ed.),
Evidence, history and the Great War: historians and the impact of 1914-18 (2003), pp. 154-71.
Shell-shock and attitudes towards mental illness
P. Barham, Forgotten lunatics of the Great War (2004), especially Part 4.

C. Emsley, ‘Violent crime in England in 1919: post-war anxieties and press narratives’, Continuity and Change 23:1
(2008), pp. 173-95.
P. Leese, Shell shock: traumatic neurosis and the British soldiers of the First World War.
J. Meyer, Men of War: masculinity and the First World War in Britain (2009), pp. 98-127.
*P. Leese, ‘Problems returning home: the British psychological casualties of the Great War’, Historical
Journal 40 (1997), pp. 1055-67.
F. Reid, Broken Men: shell-shock, treatment and recovery in Britain, 1914-1930 (2010).
M. Thomson, ‘Status, manpower and mental fitness: mental deficiency in the First World War’, in R.
Cooter, M. Harrison and S. Sturdy (eds), War, medicine and modernity (1998), pp. 149-66.
M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and health in twentieth-century Britain (2006), pp.
173-208.
Sources for the history of shell-shock
To find out what kinds of primary sources historians of shell-shock have used in researching and writing
about the topic, pick any items from the reading list and look at the footnotes. Your answer to this
presentation question is not expected to be comprehensive – it would be impossible to list every type of
source. Pick a few different types of source (three would be a good amount), and consider who produced
the source (whose viewpoint does it give?); what are the particular advantages of this type of source; and
what are the disadvantages. Think back to the essay workshop on ‘voices of madness’ when considering
these questions.
Some books/articles which it might be particularly interesting to consider are:
P. Barham, Forgotten lunatics of the Great War (2004).

M. Roper, The Secret Battle: emotional survival in the Great War (2009), pp. 243-75.
E. Showalter, The female malady: women, madness and English culture, 1830-1980 (1987), pp. 167-194.
WEEK 4: MADNESS ON FILM
MADNESS ON FILM
Outline
Page 42 of 60
The popularisation of psychological ideas in the middle years of the twentieth century coincided with the
growth of cinema as a leisure activity. As cinematic techniques for representing reality were refined,
artists and popular film-makers became more interested in how to represent unreality as well as interiority.
Altered states of consciousness, such as dreams and madness, were potent vehicles for such explorations;
on the other hand, the melodrama of madness and the stereotyped figure of the psychiatrist provided plot
devices and cheap thrills which fascinated audiences. This lecture explores madness on film, including
techniques for conveying madness; the appeal of madness to directors, producers, and audiences; the
figure of the psychiatrist in popular films; and the importance of films as a source for understanding
popular attitudes to madness and psychiatry.
Key questions
- What are the potentialities and problems of using films to understand popular ideas about madness
and psychiatry?
- How were experiences of madness conveyed in films?
- Why did madness appeal to directors, producers, and audiences as a subject for films?
Key texts
G.O. Gabbard and K. Gabbard, ‘The alienist, the quack, and the oracle’, in their Psychiatry and the
Cinema, 2nd edn (1999), pp. 35-74.
M. Shortland, ‘Screen memories: towards a history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the movies’,
British Journal of the History of Science 20 (1987), pp. 421-57.
Reading
A. Aldgate and J. Richards, Best of British: cinema and society from 1930 to the present (1999).
T. Boon, Films of Fact: a history of science in documentary films and television (2008).
K. Boyd, 'Moving pictures?: cinema and society in Britain' [Review article]. Journal of British Studies
34:1 (1995), pp. 130-5.
M.A. Doane, The Desire to Desire: the woman’s film of the 1940s (1987).
J. Ellis, ‘The quality film adventure: British critics and the cinema 1942-1948’, in A. Higson (ed.),
Dissolving Views: key writings on British cinema (1996), pp. 66-93.
I.C. Fletcher, ‘Film and history’, Radical History Review 83 (2002), pp. 173-
G. Gabbard and K. Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema, 2nd edn (1999).
C. Geraghty, British cinema in the fifties: gender, genre and the ‘new look’ (2000), pp. 76-92.
E. Girelli, 'Subverting rules and reinforcing stereotypes: Italianness in Madonna of the Seven Moons',
National Identities 6:2 (2004), pp. 157-71.
S. Harper, ‘From Holiday Camp to High Camp: women in British feature films, 1945-1951’, in A. Higson
(ed.), Dissolving Views: key writings on British cinema (1996), pp. 94-116.
S. Harper, 'Madonna of the Seven Moons', History Today 45:8 (1995), pp. 47-52.
S. Harper, Women in British cinema: mad, bad, and dangerous to know (2000).
M. Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: studying history on film (2007).
L. Kubie. ‘Psychiatry and the films’, Hollywood Quarterly 2:2 (January 1947), pp. 113-17.
A. Kuhn and S. Street (eds), Audiences and reception in Britain (1999).
M. Landy, British genres: cinema and society, 1930-1960 (1991), pp. 189-236.
M. Landy, ‘Melodrama and femininity in Second World War British cinema’, in R. Murphy (ed.), The
British cinema book. 2nd edn. (2001), pp. 119-126.
M. Landy, ‘The other side of paradise: British cinema from an American perspective’, in A. Higson and J.
Ashby (ed.), British cinema, past and present (2000), pp. 63-79.
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J. Lloyd and L. Johnson, ‘The three faces of Eve: the post-war housewife, melodrama, and home’,
Feminist Media Studies 3:1 (2003), pp. 7-25.
L.E. Mayhall, 'Teaching British cinema history as cultural history', Radical History Review 83 (2002), pp.
193-98.
R. Murphy, Realism and tinsel: cinema and society in Britain, 1939-49 (1989), pp. 99-119.
T. Perkins, ‘Two weddings and two funerals: the problem of the post-war woman’, in C. Gledhill and G.
Swanson (eds), Nationalising femininity: culture, sexuality and British cinema in the Second World
War (1996), pp. 264-281.
S.J. Schneider, 'Barbara, Julia, Carol, Myra and Nell: diagnosing female madness in British horror
cinema', in J. Petley and S. Chibnall, Steve (ed.), British horror cinema (2001), pp. 117-30.
M. Shortland, Medicine and Film: a checklist survey and research resource (1989).
A. Spicer, ‘Male stars, masculinity and British cinema, 1945-1960’, in R. Murphy (ed.), The British
cinema book. 2nd edn. (2001), pp. 93-100.
H. Tims, Emotion pictures: the ‘women’s picture’, 1930-1955 (1987).
T. Williams, Structures of Desire: British cinema, 1939-1955 (2000).
A. Winter, ‘Screening Selves: sciences of memory and identity in film, 1930-1960’, History of
Psychology 7:4 (2004), pp. 367-401
Primary sources
Madonna of the Seven Moons (dir. Arthur Crabtree, 1944).

Spellbound (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1945).
The Three Faces of Eve (dir. Nunally Johnson, 1957).
Information on particular films can be downloaded from the British Film Institute Film Online website:
www.screenonline.org.uk.
THE SEVENTH VEIL

Film screening (Wednesday 23 February)
Outline
The Seventh Veil (dir. Compton Bennett, 1945) tells the story of a celebrated pianist who attempts suicide
and then, on the psychiatrist’s couch, reveals the events that drove her to it. Although it was an
independent film, The Seventh Veil was very much in the mould of Gainsborough melodramas. It was a
huge hit in Britain and America. This film screening provides an opportunity to reflect on the lecture on
madness on film, and to consider how some of the ideas explored in this lecture could be applied to a
particular film. We will also discuss The Seventh Veil in next week’s seminar on psychology, the family,
and popular culture – it is relevant to the topics for both weeks.
Key questions
- What is ‘the seventh veil’?

- In what ways does the story of the film draw on psychoanalytic ideas?
- What visual techniques are used in the film to convey emotional disturbance?
Reading
A full synopsis, as well as other information on the film, can be downloaded from Screen Online:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/441191/index.html
Page 44 of 60
NOTE: If any students would like to write an essay or exam question on film, I can arrange additional
film screenings or lend students relevant films.
WEEK 5: THE FAMILY, PSYCHOLOGY AND POPULAR CULTURE
PSYCHOLOGY, POPULAR CULTURE, AND THE SECOND WORLD

WAR
Lecture (Wednesday 2 March)
Outline
As we have seen at numerous points this semester, from at least the beginning of the twentieth century the
general public began to show increasing interest in psychological ideas. Sophisticated psychological
concepts were no longer confined to the asylum or the clinic, but were expressed in novels, magazines,
and films. This lecture explores the infiltration of psychology into everyday life through a focus on
psychology and popular culture during and immediately after the Second World War. It considers three
areas of everyday life in which psychology was used to explain and/or manipulate behaviour: morale,
evacuation, and advice to mothers.
Key questions
- How effectively was morale managed by government and experts during the war?
- Why did psychologists seek to intervene in family life after the Second World War?
- Did the Second World War have a lasting influence on British psychological culture?
Key texts
Denise Riley, ‘The “popularisation” of psychoanalysis and psychology in Britain’, in her War in the
nursery: theories of the child and mother (1983), pp. 80-108.
M. Thomson, ‘Psychology and the mid-century crisis’ in his Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and
health in twentieth-century Britain (2006), pp. 209-49.
Civilian morale
B. Beaven and D. Thoms, 'The Blitz and civilian morale in three northern cities, 1940-42', Northern
History 32 (1996), pp. 195-203.
*B. Beaven and J. Griffiths, 'The Blitz, civilian morale and the City: Mass-Observation and working-class
culture in Britain, 1940-41', Urban History 26:1 (1999), pp. 71-88.
*J. Black, 'Civilians in warfare', History Today 56:5 (2006), pp. 10-17.
*S.T. Casper, 'The origins of the Anglo-American Research Alliance and the incidence of civilian
neuroses in Second World War Britain', Medical History 52:3 (2008), pp. 327-46.
S. Grayzel, Fighting for the idea of home life: Mrs Miniver and Anglo-American representations of
domestic morale’, in S. Grayzel and P. Levine (eds), Gender, labour, war and empire: essays on
modern Britain (2009), pp. 139-56.
*E. Jones, R. Woolven, B. Durodie, and S. Wessely, 'Civilian morale during the Second World War:
responses to air raids re-examined', Social History of Medicine 17:3 (2004), pp. 463-79.
R. Mackay, Half the battle: civilian morale in Britain during the Second World War (2002).
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I. Mclaine, Ministry of morale: home front morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II
(1979).
N. Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (1989), chapter. 2.
B. Shephard, A war of nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (2002), chapter 13.
G. Swanson, ‘"So much money and so little to spend it on": morale, consumption and sexuality’, in C.
Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds), Nationalising femininity: culture, sexuality and British cinema in
the Second World War (1996), pp. 70-90.
M. Thomson, 'Before anti-psychiatry: 'mental health' in wartime Britain', in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R.
Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain and the Netherlands
(Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
M. Thomson, ‘Psychology and the mid-century crisis’ in his Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and
health in twentieth-century Britain (2006), pp. 209-49.
D. Thoms, ‘The Blitz, civilian morale and regionalism, 1940-1942’, in P. Kirkham and D. Thoms (eds),
War culture: social change and changing experience in World War Two Britain (1995), pp. 3-12.
J. Weingärtner, The arts as a weapon of war: Britain and the shaping of the national morale in the Second
World War (2005).
Evacuation
L.M. Akhtar, ‘Intangible casualties: the evacuation of British children during World War II’, Journal of
Psychohistory 37:3 (2010), pp. 224-54.
J. Anderson, Children of the war years: childhood in Britain during 1939 to 1945 (2008).
M. Brown, A child's war: Britain's children in the Second World War (2000).
M. Brown, Evacuees: evacuation in wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (2000).
T. Crosby, The impact of civilian evacuation in the Second World War (1986).
P. Cunningham and P. Gardner, ‘"Saving the nation's children": teachers, wartime evacuation in England
and Wales and the construction of national identity’, History of Education 28:3 (1999), pp. 327-38.
L.L. Downs, ‘Milieu social or milieu familial? Theories and practices of childrearing among the popular
classes in 20th-century France and Britain: the case of evacuation (1939-45)’, Family & Community
History 8:1 (2005), pp. 49-66.
* D. Foster, S. Davies and H. Steele, 'The evacuation of British children during World War II: a
preliminary investigation into the long-term psychological effects', Aging and Mental Health 7:5
(2003), pp. 398-408.
J. Hartley, ‘“Letters are everything these days”: mothers and letters in the Second World War’, in R. Earle
(ed.), Epistolary selves: letters and letter-writers, 1600-1945 (1999), pp. 183-95.
R. Inglis, The children's war: evacuation, 1939-45 (1989).
C. Jackson, The child evacuation program in World War II Britain (2008).
J. Macnicol, 'The effect of the evacuation of school children on official attitudes to state intervention', in
H. Smith (ed.), War and social change: British society in the Second World War (1986), pp. 3-31.
P. Starns, The evacuation of children during World War II (2004).
J. Stewart and J. Welshman, ‘The evacuation of children in wartime Scotland: culture, behaviour and
poverty’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 26:1-2 (2006), pp. 100-120.
*J. Welshman, 'Evacuation, hygiene, and social policy: the Our Towns report of 1943'. Historical Journal
42 (1999), pp. 781-807.
*J. Welshman, 'Evacuation and social policy during the Second World War: myth and reality', 20th
Century British History 9 (1998), pp. 28-53.
Advice to mothers
L. Appignanesi, ‘Mother and Child’, in her Mad, Bad and Sad: a history of women and the mind doctors
from 1800 to the present (2008), pp. 272-300.
D. Beekman, The mechanical baby: a popular history of the theory and practice of child raising (1977).
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A. Davis, '"The ordinary good mother": women's construction of their identity as mothers, Oxfordshire c.
1945-1970', in Alyson Brown (ed.), Historical perspectives on social identities (2006), pp. 114-28.
D. Dick, Yesterday's babies: a history of babycare (1987).
* G. Gerson, ‘Individuality, deliberation and welfare in Donald Winnicott’, History of the Human
Sciences 18:1 (2005), pp. 107-26.
Christina Hardyment, Dream babies: Child care from Locke to Spock (1983).
J. Issroff, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby: personal and professional perspectives (2005).
B. Mayhew, 'Between love and aggression: the politics of John Bowlby', History of the Human Sciences
19:4 (2006), pp. 19-36.
N. Newcombe and L. Lerner, 'Britain between the wars: the historical context of Bowlby's theory of
attachment', Psychiatry 45 (1982), pp. 1-12.
A. Phillips, Winnicott (1988).
* D. Riley, ‘“The Free Mothers”: pronatalism and working women in industry at the end of the last war in
Britain'. History Workshop Journal 11 (1981), pp. 59-118.
F. Rodman, Winnicott: his life and work (2003).
N. Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (1989), chapters 11-15 (especially ch. 14).
* P. Starkey, 'The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England',
Women's History Review, 9:3 (2000), pp. 539-57.
L. Tracey, 'Reconstituting the family: education for parenthood and maternity and child welfare, 1945-60',
in L. Black (ed.), Consensus or coercion? The state, the people and social cohesion in post-war
Britain (2001), pp. 136-50.
* D.S. Wilson, 'A new look at the affluent worker: the good working mother in post-war Britain',
Twentieth Century British History, 17:2 (2006), pp. 206-29.
PSYCHOLOGY AND POPULAR CULTURE

Seminar (Thursday 3 March)
Outline
This seminar will explore different ways in which psychology infiltrated popular culture in the years
surrounding the Second World War. It will bring together different strands studied in the module this
semester, and provide an opportunity to recap and summarise the changes in psychology and popular
culture in the first half of the century. In the seminar, we will use different primary sources (including
reflection on The Seventh Veil) to consider the appeal of psychology to different audiences and how
psychological ideas were expressed in different mediums. We will compare and contrast these different
types of sources and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.
Key questions
- What difficulties are there in researching the infiltration of psychology into everyday life?
- Which world war was a more important turning point for popular psychology?
- How and in what ways did popular understandings of psychology change in the first half of the
twentieth century?
Key texts
Extracts from Richard Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (1950).

Donald Winnicott, ‘A man looks at motherhood’, B.B.C. broadcast (1949). Taken from D.W. Winnicott,
The Child and the Family: first relationships (1957).
Clifford Yorke, ‘Winnicott, Donald Woods (1896-1971)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38140
A.H. Halsey, ‘Titmuss, Richard Morris (1907-1973)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31763
Page 47 of 60
Additional reading
Please see the lecture reading for Week 5.
******WEEK 6: READING WEEK******
BLOCK 4: MADNESS IN POST-1945 BRITAIN
This block examines madness in post-1945 Britain. The most striking feature of this period was the
gradual dismantling of the asylum and restructuring of the mental health care services, a development
made possible through the introduction of effective pharmaceutical means of controlling many psychotic
disorders. Much of this block is spent examining the ramifications of these changes in the provision of
care. After the Second World War, the authority of psychological concepts became even more entrenched
in British society, a trend examined here through advice to mothers, c. 1945-1960, and the growth of
‘counselling cultures’. If loose notions of psychology became more powerful, however, psychiatry itself
was criticised from without and within, most trenchantly by the anti-psychiatry movement. By the end of
the period, psychology and psychiatry were in the contradictory position of being powerful and accepted,
but increasingly attacked as the cause of many modern ills.
GENERAL READING
General books
P. Barham, Closing the Asylum: the mental patient in modern society (1992).
P. Fennell, Treatment without consent: law, psychiatry and the treatment of mentally disordered people
since 1845 (1996).
M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain
and the Netherlands (Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
A. Rogers and D. Pilgrim, Mental health policy in Britain, 2nd edn (2001).
N. Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (1989).
M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and health in twentieth-century Britain (2006)
C. Unsworth, The politics of mental health legislation (1987).
The mental health care services
J. Busfield, 'Restructuring mental health services in twentieth-century Britain', in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and

R. Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain and the
Netherlands (Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
*N. Crossley, 'Transforming the mental health field: the early history of the National Association for
Mental Health', Sociology of Health and Illness 20:4 (1998), pp. 458-88.
P. Dale and J. Melling, 'The politics of mental welfare: fresh perspectives on the history of
institutionalized care for the mentally ill and disabled', in P. Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental
illness and learning disability since 1850 : finding a place for mental disorder in the United
Kingdom (2006), pp. 1-23.
*H. Freeman, 'Mental health services in an English county borough before 1974', Medical History, 28
(1984), pp. 111-28.
R. Furlong, 'Haven within or without the hospital gate: a reappraisal of asylum provision in theory and
practice', in D. Tomlinson and J. Carrier (eds), Asylum in the community (1996), pp. 135-68.
Page 48 of 60
K. Jones, ‘The diminishing mental hospitals’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp.
191-194.
J.V. Pickstone, 'Psychiatry in district general hospitals: history, contingency and local innovation in the
early years of the National Health Service', in J.V. Pickstone (ed.), Medical innovations in historical
perspective (1992), pp. 185-99 and pp. 272-76.
*S. Rolph, J. Walmsley and D. Atkinson, '"A man's job"? Gender issues and the role of mental health
welfare officers, 1948-1970', Oral History 30:1 (2002), pp. 28-41.
C. Webster, 'Psychiatry and the early National Health Service: the role of the Mental Health Standing
Advisory Committee', in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, 1841-
1991 (1991), pp. 103-16.
J. Welshman, 'Inside the walls of the hostel, 1940-1974', in P. Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental illness
and learning disability since 1850: finding a place for mental disorder in the United Kingdom
(2006), pp. 200-23.
Psychology, psychiatry, and models of mind
P.J. Corr, 'Reflections on the Scientific Life of Hans Eysenck', History & Philosophy of Psychology 2:1
(2000), pp. 18-36.
J. Hall, 'The emergence of clinical psychology in Britain from 1943 to 1958 part I: Core tasks and the
professionalisation process', History & Philosophy of Psychology 9:1 (2007), pp. 29-55.
J. Hall, 'The emergence of clinical psychology in Britain from 1943 to 1958 part II: Practice and research
traditions', History & Philosophy of Psychology 9:2 (2007), pp. 1-33.
J. Hall, T. Lavender, and S. Llewelyn, 'A history of clinical psychology in Britain: Some impressions and
reflections', History & Philosophy of Psychology 4:2 (2002), pp. 32-48.
R. Hayward, '"Our friends electric": mechanical models of mind in postwar Britain', in G. Bunn, A. Lovie,
and G. Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain: historical essays and personal reflections (2001), pp.
290-308.
E. Miller, 'Twentieth century British clinical psychology and psychiatry: their historical relationship', in H.
Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry. Vol. 2: the aftermath (1996), pp.
156-70.
N.H. Rafter, 'H. J. Eysenck in Fagin's kitchen: the return to biological theory in 20th-century criminology',
History of the Human Sciences 19:4 (2006), pp. 37-56.
WEEK 7: CLOSING THE ASYLUM
CLOSING THE ASYLUM: MADNESS IN POST-1945 BRITAIN

Outline
This lecture provides an overview of the main changes in psychiatry and psychology in British culture, c.
1945-2000. It covers changes in mental health care provision, the rise of psychopharmacology,
transformations in patient experience, and psychology in everyday life.
Key questions
- What were the main changes in mental health care provision after 1945?
- How did public attitudes to mental health change in this period?
- Did these changes in provision and attitudes affect patient experience?
Key texts
Page 49 of 60
P. Barham, Closing the Asylum: the mental patient in modern society (1992), pp. 1-38.
J. Busfield, 'Restructuring mental health services in twentieth-century Britain', in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and
R. Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain and the
Netherlands (Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
Additional reading
The mental health care services
Peter Barham, Closing the Asylum: the mental patient in modern society (1992).
J. Busfield, ‘Mental illness’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth
Century (2003), pp. 633-52.
J. Hopton, ‘Prestwich Hospital in the twentieth century: a case study of slow and uneven progress in the
development of psychiatric care’, History of Psychiatry 10 (1999), pp. 349-74.
K. Jones, ‘The diminishing mental hospitals’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp.
191-194.
A. Rogers and D. Pilgrim, Mental health policy in Britain, 2nd edn (2001).
Patient experiences
K. Davies, '"A small corner that's for myself": space, place and patients' experiences of mental health care,
1948-98', in L.E. Topp, J.E. Moran, and J. Andrews (eds), Madness, architecture and the built
environment: psychiatric spaces in historical context (2007), pp. 305-20.
*K. Davies, '"Silent and censured travellers"?: patients' narratives and patients' voices : perspectives on the
history of mental illness since 1948', Social History of Medicine, 14:2 (2001), pp. 267-92.
D. Gittins, Madness in its place: narratives of Severalls Hospital, 1913-1997 (1998).
Psychopharmacology and other treatment methods
*P. Barham, ‘Review: the creation of psychopharmacology’, Social History of Medicine 16:3 (2003).
J.L. Crammer, ‘Britain in the fifties: leucotomy and open doors’, History of Psychiatry 5 (1994), pp. 393-
95.
*E.A. Danto, ‘Review: Reinventing depression: a history of the treatment of depression in primary care,
1940-2004’, Social History of Medicine 18:3 (2005).
D. Healy, 'The history of British psychopharmacology', in H. Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds), 150 years
of British psychiatry. Vol. 2: the aftermath (1996), pp. 61-88.
D. Healy, ‘The origin of antidepressants’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp. 169-72.
D. Healy, ‘Psychopharmacology 2000’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp. 352-57.
D. Healy, The Anti-Depressant Era (1997).
J. Moncrieff, ‘An investigation into the precedents of modern drug treatment in psychiatry’, History of
Psychiatry 10 (1999), pp. 475-90.
M. Shepherd, ‘Neurolepsis and the psychopharmacological revolution: myth and reality’, History of
Psychiatry 5 (1994), pp. 89-96.
J. Slinn, '"A cascade of medicine": the marketing and consumption of prescription drugs in the UK 1948–
2000', in L. Curth (ed.), From physick to pharmacology: five hundred years of British drug retailing
(2006), pp. 143-69.
Page 50 of 60
S. Snelders, ‘Essay review: psychotropic drugs and mental health care’, History of Psychiatry 21 (2010),
pp. 356-60.
E.M. Tansey, ‘“They used to call in psychiatry”: aspects of the development and impact of
psychopharmacology’, in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter (eds), Cultures of Psychiatry and
Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands (1998), pp. 79-101.
WEEK 8: ANTI-PSYCHIATRY
ANTI-PSYCHIATRY
Outline
In the 1960s strong criticisms of psychiatry were made by a number of intellectual, sociologists and –
most surprisingly – psychiatrists themselves. It was argued that traditional psychiatry upheld the
conservative social and political order, and labelled individuals as ‘mad’ if they deviated from strict norms
of behaviour. The anti-psychiatry movement tried to re-define ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’, and to ‘liberate’
individuals rather than treating them. This lecture explores the origins of anti-psychiatry, its key ideas, and
its influence.
Key questions
- What were the main criticisms of conventional psychiatry formulated in the 1960s?
- How was anti-psychiatry related to the counter-culture?
- Did the anti-psychiatry movement have any lasting influence?
Key text
D. Tantum, ‘R.D. Laing and anti-psychiatry’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp.
202-207.
Additional reading
D. Abrahamson, 'R. D. Laing and long-stay patients: discrepant accounts of the refractory ward and
'rumpus room' at Gartnavel Royal Hospital', History of Psychiatry 18:2 (2007), pp. 203-15.
J. Andrews, 'R.D. Laing in Scotland: facts and fictions of the 'rumpus room' and interpersonal psychiatry',
in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar
Britain and the Netherlands (Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
D. Burston, The wing of madness: the life and work of R.D. Laing (1996).
J. Clay, R.D. Laing: a divided self (1996).
K. Collins, 'Joseph Schorstein: R. D. Laing's "rabbi"'. History of Psychiatry, 19:2 (2008), pp. 185-201.
*N. Crossley, ‘R.D. Laing and British anti-psychiatry: a socio-historical analysis’, Social Science and
Medicine 47 (1998), pp. 877-98.
*N. Crossley, ‘Working utopias and social movements: an investigation using case study materials from
radical mental health movements in Britain’, Sociology 33 (1999), pp. 809-30.
D. Double, ‘The history of anti-psychiatry: an essay review’, History of Psychiatry 13 (2002), pp. 231-
236.
M. Gavin, ‘R. D. Laing and theology: the influence of Christian existentialism on The Divided Self’,
History of the Human Sciences 22:2 (April 2009), 1-21.
Z. Kotowicz, R.D. Laing and the paths of anti-psychiatry (1997).
A. Laing, R.D. Laing: a biography (1994).
M. Micale and R. Porter (eds), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (1994), Part 5.
G.S. Rousseau, 'Autobiography of a Schizophrenic (1951) and the postwar anti-psychiatric movement:
1946-51', History of Psychiatry 19:1 (2008), pp. 101-106.
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P. Sedgwick, Psycho-Politics: Laing, Foucault, Goffman, Szasz and the future of mass psychiatry (1982).
D. Tantam, 'The anti-psychiatry movement', in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years of British
psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991), pp. 333-47.
ANTI-PSYCHIATRY AND THE FAMILY

Primary source-based session (Friday 18 March)
Outline
Anti-psychiatrists challenged existing definitions of normal and abnormal. This included radical re-
conceptualisations of particular categories of mental illness, and the role of social structures in fostering
mental health or illness. This session will explore the relation between the family and madness in key
works of anti-psychiatry, and how these portrayals infiltrated popular culture.
Key questions
- According to anti-psychiatrists, why was the family a source of madness?

- Why were anti-psychiatry’s accounts of the role of the family in producing mental illness so
radical?
- How convincing are feminist reinterpretations of anti-psychiatry?
Key texts
L. Appignanesi, ‘Rebels’ in her Mad, Bad and Sad: a history of women and the mind doctors from 1800
to the present (2008), pp. 349-77.
E. Showalter, ‘Women, madness and the family’ in her The Female Malady: women, madness and
English culture 1830-1980 (1987), pp. 220-247.
Additional reading
Please also see reading for week 8, lecture on anti-psychiatry.
I. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory (1995).
P. Miller, ‘Critiques of psychiatry and critical sociologies of madness’, in P. Miller and N. Rose (eds), The
Power of Psychiatry (1986), pp. 12-42.
R. Porter, ‘Anti-psychiatry and the family: taking the long view’ in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter
(eds), Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands
(1998), pp. 257-81
M. Thomson, ‘Towards the permissive society’ in his Psychological Subjects: identity, culture, and health
in twentieth-century Britain (2006), pp. 250-88.
Primary sources
Books:
D. Cooper, The Death of the Family (1971)
A. Esterson, The Leaves of Spring: schizophrenia, family and sacrifice (1970)
R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967)
R.D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964)
M. Barnes and J. Berke, Mary Barnes: two accounts of a journey through madness (1973).
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Film:
Family Life (dir. Ken Loach, 1971).
Play:
D. Edgar, Mary Barnes (1978).
WEEK 9: CARE IN THE COMMUNITY
CARE IN THE COMMUNITY

Seminar (Wednesday 30 March)
Outline
This seminar explores the most sweeping change in post-1945 mental health care, the closing of asylums
and the treatment of mentally ill patients within the community. It examines why ‘community care’
became a key plank of mental health policy, the antecedents of community care, and what attitudes to
‘care in the community’ reveal about changing attitudes to mental illness. To examine these issues, we
will focus on the newspaper article ‘My son has schizophrenia. Why can’t the system cope?’.
General questions
- Why did ‘community care’ become a feasible policy?

- How has the public reacted to ‘community care’ since 1945?
- Has ‘care in the community’ been a success?
Questions on the newspaper article
- What is the potential bias of this author?

- What issues regarding the rights of the patient are raised by this article?
- How is the issue of risk to the public considered in this article?
- How is community care portrayed in the article?
Key texts
Please read:
T. Salmon, ‘My son has schizophrenia. Why can’t the system cope?’, Observer, Sunday 19 November
2006. Downloaded 4th March 2010:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/nov/19/socialcare.observerfocus
AND at least ONE of the following:
P. Barham, 'From the asylum to the community: the mental patient in postwar Britain', in M. Gijswijt-
Hofstra and R. Porter (eds), Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain and
the Netherlands (Clio Medica, 49) (1998).
H. Freeman, ‘Community Care’ in H. Freeman (ed.), A Century of Psychiatry (1999), pp. 213-217
J. Welshman, 'Rhetoric and reality : community care in England and Wales, 1948-74', in P. Bartlett and D.
Wright (eds), Outside the walls of the asylum: the history of care in the community, 1750-2000
(1999), pp. 204-226.
Additional reading
P. Barham, Closing the Asylum: the mental patient in modern society (1992).
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P. Bartlett, 'Community care and its antecedents', in P. Bartlett and D. Wright (eds), Outside the walls of
the asylum: the history of care in the community, 1750-2000 (1999), pp. 1-18.
D. Bennett, 'The drive towards the community', in G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 years of British
psychiatry, 1841-1991 (1991), pp. 321-32.
*M. Cavadino, ‘A vindication of the rights of psychiatric patients’, Journal of Law and Society 24:2 (June
1997), pp. 235-51.
*N. Crossley, ‘Fish, field, habitus and madness: on the first wave mental health users movement in
Britain’, British Journal of Sociology 50 (1999), pp. 647-70.
*N. Crossley, 'Transforming the mental health field: the early history of the National Association for
Mental Health', Sociology of Health and Illness 20:4 (1998), pp. 458-88.
*P. Fennell, ‘The third way in mental health policy: negative rights, positive rights, and the Convention’,
Journal of Law and Society 26:1 (March 1999), pp. 103-27.
century to the 1990s (1993), chapters 9-11.
*J. Lewis, '“It all really starts in the family....”: community care in the 1980s’, Journal of Law and Society
16 (Spring 1989), pp. 83-96.
S. Payne, 'Outside the walls of the asylum? Psychiatric treatment in the 1980s and 1990s', in P. Bartlett
and D. Wright (eds), Outside the walls of the asylum: the history of care in the community, 1750-
2000 (1999), pp. 244-263.
*S. Payne, ‘Psychiatric care in the community: does it fail young men?’, Policy and Politics 24:2 (April
1996), pp. 193-205
*B. Salter, ‘The politics of community care: social rights and welfare limits’, Policy and Politics 22:2
(April 1994), pp. 119-31.
M. Thomson, 'Community care and the control of mental defectives in inter-war Britain', in P. Horden and
R. Smith (eds), The locus of care: families, communities, institutions, and the provision of welfare
since antiquity (1988), pp. 198-218.
D. Tomlinson and J. Carrier (eds), Asylum in the community (1996).
*L. Westwood, 'Care in the community of the mentally disordered: the case of the Guardianship Society,
1900-1939', Social History of Medicine 20:1 (2007), pp. 57-72.
You may also wish to look at some of the responses to Tim Salmon’s article in the Observer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/nov/26/letters.theobserver1
Contemporary sources on community care/ care in the community
1960s/70s:
*N. Roberts, ‘Mental hospital or community care?’, Guardian, 27 April 1962, p. 10.
A. Lappin, ‘Community careless’, New Society, 9 April 1970, pp. 589-91.
D. Ball, ‘A return to community care’, New Society, 24 June 1971, p. 1095.
1980s/90s:
*M. Phillips, ‘Learning how to cope. Community care in Hackney’, Guardian, 26 May 1982, p. 9.
*R.C.S. Furlong and J.P. Watson, ‘Lewisham Mental Health Advice centre: a new development in
community care’, Community Development Journal 18 (October 1983), pp. 222-30.
*D. Berry, ‘Street level alternative’, Guardian, 12 June 1985, p. 11.
J. Melville, ‘Mentally ill in Brixton’, New Society, 15 November 1985, p. 291.
J. Laurance, ‘The crisis in community care’, New Society, 18 September 1987, suppt., pp. 1-12.
*A. McElvoy, ‘Does anybody care?’, Times, 12 July 1989, p. 19.
*J. Sherman and J. Dettmer, ‘Vicious circle makes crime of mental illness’, Times, 14 November 1989, p.
7.
*S. Cook, ‘Between haven and hell’, Guardian, 14 March 1990, p. 21.
*L. Chester, ‘Someone to watch over me’, Guardian, 10 April 1993, Weekend, pp. 18-19, 21-2, and 24.
*T. Jowell, ‘More community, more care’, Guardian, 11 August 1993, p. 16.
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*M. McFadyean, ‘Community care. He's liable to kill. And she's supposed to stop him’, Observer, 27 Apr
97, Review, p. 6.
WEEK 10: PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
END OF A CENTURY: THERAPY CULTURE AND SELF-HELP

Lecture (Wednesday 6 April)
Outline
As the twentieth century grew to a close, the hold of psychology on everyday culture was increasingly
criticised in some quarters. It began to be argued that far from increasing understanding of the mind and
helping individuals to cope with the trials of modern life, ‘counselling culture’ encourages individuals to
see ordinary problems as psychological illnesses, and increases dependence on the ‘psych’ professions. By
the end of the century, self-help titles proliferated and therapy was normalised – but does this mean people
were better educated about the self, or simply more self-indulgent?
Key questions
- What are the main criticisms of ‘therapy culture’?

- Who benefits from ‘self-help’?
- Are criticisms of ‘therapy culture’ reactionary or revolutionary?
Key texts
T. Osborne and P. Miller, “On therapeutic authority: psychoanalytical expertise under advanced
liberalism,” History of the Human Sciences 7:3 (1994), pp. 29-64.
*H.M. Rimke, ‘Governing citizens through self-help literature’, Cultural Studies 14:1 (January 2000), pp.
61-78.
Additional reading
*M. Barke, R. Fribush, and P. Stearns, ‘Nervous breakdown in twentieth-century American culture’,
Social History 33 (2000), pp. 565-84.
*T. Besley, ‘Counselling and identity: self realisation in a therapy culture’, British Journal of Guidance
and Counselling 33:3 (August 2005), pp. 425-428.
*T. Besley, ‘Foucault and the turn to narrative therapy’, British Journal of Guidance and Counselling 30:2
(May 2002), pp. 125-143.
*L. Blackman, ‘Self-help, media cultures and the production of female psychopathology’, European
Journal of Cultural Studies 7:2 (2004), pp. 219-36.
*L.M. Blokland, ‘Falling into the cracks of culture, disinheriting the future: counselling at the heart of
transformation’, International Journal of Psychology 35:3-4 (June-August 2000), pp. 412.
A.C. Brock, ‘Psychology and liberal democracy: a spurious connection?’, in A.C. Brock (ed.),
Internationalizing the history of psychology (2006).
P. Cafaro, ‘The virtues of self-help’, Philosophy Now 45 (March-April 2004), pp. 9-13.
M. Collins, Modern love: an intimate history of men and women in twentieth-century Britain (2003).
*B.R. Cowlishaw, ‘Subjects are from Mars, objects are from Venus: construction of the self in self-help’,
Journal of Popular Culture 35:1 (2009), pp. 169-184.
Page 55 of 60
V.L. DeFrancisco and P. O’Connor, ‘A feminist critique of self-help books on heterosexual romance: read
'em and weep’, Women's Studies in Communication 18:2 (1995), pp. 217-27
S.D. Downey, ‘Helping our selves: feminist analyses of self-help literature’, Women's Studies in
Communication 18:2 (1995)
*W. Dryden, D. Mearns and B. Thorne, ‘Counselling in the United Kingdom: past, present and future’,
British Journal of Guidance and Counselling 28:4 (November 2000), pp. 467-83.
M. Ebben, ‘Off the shelf salvation: a feminist critique of self-help’, Women's Studies in Communication
18:2 (1995), pp. 111-22.
*F. Furedi and D. Leader, ‘What's love got to do with it?’, Times, 11 October 2003, BodyandSoul, pp. 12-
13.
F. Furedi, Therapy culture: cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age (2004).
D. Grodin, ‘Women reading self-help: themes of separation and connection’, Women's Studies in
Communication 18:2 (1995), 123-34.
*B. Gunnell, ‘The happiness industry’, New Statesman 133, 6 September 2004, pp. 10-12.
P. Heelas, The new age movement: the celebration of self and the sacralization of modernity (1996)
*P. Hodson, ‘Why the Brits are in two minds about therapy’, British Journal of Guidance and
Counselling 32:3 (August 2004), pp. 407-412.
*R. House, ‘“Limits to therapy and counselling”: deconstructing a professional ideology’, British Journal
of Guidance and Counselling 27:3 (August 1999), pp. 377-392.
*A. Howard, ‘What can philosophy offer counselling and psychotherapy?’, British Journal of Guidance
and Counselling 28:3 (August 2000), 411-419.
*H. Lee, ‘“Truths that set us free?”: the use of rhetoric in mind-body-spirit books’, Journal of
Contemporary Religion 22:1 (January 2007), 91-104.
*S. Merritt, ‘Escape from self-help hell’, Observer, suppl. Review, 31 August 2008, p. 21.
T. Miller and A. McHoul, ‘Helping the self’, Social Text 57 (1998), pp. 127-55.
*I. Parker, ‘Tracing therapeutic discourse in material culture’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 72:4
(December 1999), pp. 577-587.
*M.A. Peters, ‘Foucault, counselling and the aesthetics of existence’, British Journal of Guidance and
Counselling 33:3 (August 2005), pp. 383-396.
*B. Philip, ‘Analysing the politics of self-help books on depression’, Journal of Sociology 45:2 (June
2009), pp. 151-168.
*C. Rayner, ‘Help!’, Independent, 6 July 2001, Review, p. 1 and 7.
N. Rose, ‘Identity, genealogy, history’, in S. Hall and P. Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity
(1996), pp. 128-150.
N. Rose, ‘Individualizing psychology’, in J. Shotter and K. Gergen (eds), Texts of Identity (1989), pp. 119-
132
N. Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (1989), Part 4.
N. Rose, “Mobilizing the consumer: assembling the subject of consumption”, Theory Culture and Society
14:1 (1997), pp. 1-36.
A. Samuels, Politics on the couch: citizenship and the internal life (2001).
A. Watson, ‘Cries of fire: psychotherapy in contemporary British and Irish drama’, Modern Drama 51:2
(Summer 2008), pp. 188-210.
*K. Wright, ‘Theorizing therapeutic culture: past influences, future directions’, Journal of Sociology 44:4
(December 2008), pp. 321-336.
SELF-HELP AND THERAPY CULTURE

Seminar (Thursday 7 April)
Outline
This seminar provides an opportunity to reflect upon the place of psychiatry and psychology in
contemporary culture, and how ‘therapy culture’ relates to long-term historical trends in approaches to
Page 56 of 60
mental health. We will consider particularly the differing forms psychological knowledge takes in
contemporary society, and the groups or individuals who are seen to hold power in relation to
psychological or psychiatric knowledge.
Key questions
- How has the exercise of psychiatric or psychological power changed since 1800?
- Is ‘therapy culture’ new?
- How convincing is Nikolas Rose’s interpretation of the rise of therapeutic authority?
Key texts
N. Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (1989), chapter 18.
C. Cadwalladr, ‘Welcome to the bright new world of positive living’, Observer Review, Sunday 4 October
2009.
Additional reading
Please see the lecture reading list for week 10.
WEEK 11: REVISION WORKSHOP
REVISION WORKSHOP
Wednesday 13 April
Outline
In this workshop we will examine: choosing revision topics; planning revision; and writing effective
examination papers.
Key questions
Please prepare written answers to the key questions and bring them to the revision workshop. These will
be the basis for out discussion.
- How was the experience of mental patients different in 1800 and 2000?
- What were the main changes in attitudes to madness, c. 1800-2000?
- In what ways did attitudes to madness stay the same over this period?
****** EASTER ******
Page 57 of 60
ASSESSMENT
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. How and why have historians disagreed about the factors influencing the rise of the asylum?
2. What are the main differences in historians’ accounts of how asylum psychiatry attempted to cure
madness, and how can these differences be explained?
3. To what extent have historians agreed that the asylum was a failure as a curative institution?
4. Assess the importance of the concept of ‘gender’ in histories of Victorian psychiatry.
ASSESSED ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. ‘Ignorance about human nature gave way to rational understanding, and an age of “cruel
treatment” was replaced by a widespread commitment to justice and compassion for the insane.’
To what extent can the history of Victorian psychiatry support those claims?
2. Was class or gender more important in shaping experiences of madness in the nineteenth
century?
3. Assess the social significance of phrenology OR hypnosis in the nineteenth century.
4. In what ways and with what consequences did psychiatry draw on theories of hereditary
degeneration during the second half of the nineteenth century?
5. Is it possible for the historian to access the ‘authentic’ voice of the mad?
6. In what ways did psychoanalysis influence early twentieth century culture and psychiatry?
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of films as sources for understanding attitudes
to madness?
8. How effective were psychological interventions in everyday life in the mid-twentieth

century?
9. Was the move to community care after 1945 doomed to fail?
10. ‘The excesses of modern culture demonstrate that psychology has done more harm than
good in recent decades’. Explain and evaluate this statement.
Page 58 of 60
SPECIMEN EXAM PAPER
You have THREE hours.
Answer THREE questions.
1. How, why, and when did the asylum fail as a curative institution?
2. Was class or gender more important in shaping experiences of madness in the nineteenth century?
3. Explain the rise and fall in the popularity of EITHER phrenology OR hypnosis in the nineteenth
century.
4. In what ways did theories of degeneration reflect the anxieties generated by modern life?
5. Did psychoanalysis succeed or fail in early twentieth-century Britain?
6. To what extent did the experience of the First World War confirm or change existing attitudes
towards mental illness?
7. How and why did psychologists seek to intervene in everyday life during and after the Second
World War?
8. Assess the importance of changes in mental health care provision after 1945 in shaping patient
experience and public attitudes to mental illness.
9. How and why did anti-psychiatry mount a radical challenge to existing notions of mental health
and illness?
10. Does ‘counselling culture’ give the powerless a voice, or encourage the weak to feel sorry for
themselves?
Page 59 of 60
HOW TO WRITE A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
In one vital respect a historiographical essay is the same as any essay or exam answer. Everything that you
say must constitute an answer to the question, and at the same time a justification of your view. The
historiographical essay is no different.
However, in the historiographical essay you are being asked:
• How is the historiographical argument constructed?

• What are the theoretical influences on this piece of writing?
• What sources has the historian used?
• How convincing is his/her argument?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the piece of writing under consideration?
You should think about the place of each piece of writing within the wider historiography:
• How does the piece of work under consideration fit with other writings on the history of
psychiatry?
• What influence has it had on history of psychiatry?
• How have other historians responded to it?
• How have historians agreed or disagreed about a particular topic, and why?
Normally, when you read a book or an article you are most concerned with the empirical content of the
piece(s) in question. In other words, you will read an article about the history of psychiatry in order to find
out something about psychiatry in that period. You will also be interested also in the author’s assumptions
and concepts, but this is not your sole interest. In the historiographical essay you are should only very
briefly convey the scope and the main arguments of the piece of work under consideration. There is no
need to give a lengthy summary of the book.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: POINTS ON THEORY
• Consider the professional biography of the historian and the nature of their other published work.
• Remember that many historians incorporate insights from a number of different theoretical
perspectives (rather than just one) without necessarily attributing this very explicitly.
• Some historians might claim to eschew ‘theory’. When they say this, they might actually be taking
two different positions, and it is essential that you understand what they are:
a) They might be subscribing to a view that it is possible through impartial and unbiased research
and observation to uncover some underlying truths in history. If this is the case, it is important for
you to recognise the ‘theory’ implicit in ‘anti-theory’. What particular philosophical/theoretical
position would encourage a historian to seek out ‘objective’ ‘truths’?
b). More likely it will mean that the writer is against over-arching theories (sometimes referred to
as meta-theories, meta-narratives or grand narratives) which attempt to fit historical change into
an overall and determinate pattern. Marxism, modernisation, radical feminism could all be seen in
this way. Historians who reject meta-theories, both consciously and unconsciously, will often,
however, incorporate theories with a small ‘t’ into their accounts: for example they will use the
concept of gender, class, supply and demand theory, forms of materialism, or psychological
concepts.
• Look at the footnotes. These provide indications as to which theories are used, what other works
have influenced the historian, and what sources are being used.
Page 60 of 60

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HS1745

MANAGING THE MIND

Dr. Tracey Loughran, Room 4.30

• Contact details Room: 4.30

• Teaching sessions Wednesdays, 9.00 – 9.50am, Room 4.43

• Office hours Wednesdays, 10.00 – 11.00am

• How I will contact you

Reading for seminars, lectures, and other teaching sessions:

Making the most of your reading:

General reading lists:

Additional reading lists:

Library and electronic resources:

TEACHING AND LEARNING METHODS

Non-assessed (formative) work

The non-assessed (formative) assignment will be a historiographical essay of 1,000 words. A

For the deadline, see the Year 2 Handbook.

The aims of this module are:

In more detail, this means you should be able to:

Please read BOTH of the following items:

J. Busfield, Managing Madness: changing ideas and practice (1986).

WEEK 2: INTRODUCTION TO THE ASYLUM

THE ASYLUM: RISE, EXPANSION AND STAGNATION

Please read the following item:

The rise of the asylum

Case studies of asylums and their keepers

Stagnation and decline

Historiography of the asylum

DEBATE: THE ASYLUM: SUCCESS OR FAILURE?

In this seminar we will debate the question:

‘Did the asylum succeed or fail in the nineteenth century?’

Please read at least ONE of the following items:

WEEK 3: THE ASYLUM AS CURATIVE INSTITUTION

THE ASYLUM AS CURATIVE INSTITUTION

- How effective was the asylum as a curative institution?

Please read at least TWO of the following items:

N. Tomes, ‘The great restraint controversy: a comparative perspective on Anglo-American psychiatry in

Moral management and other treatments

WEEK 4: CLASS, GENDER, AND THE ASYLUM

CLASS, GENDER, AND THE ASYLUM

Poverty and class

- How did mad women defy expectations of conventional femininity?

Please read BOTH the following items:

S. D’Cruze, Everyday violence in Britain, 1850-1950: gender and class (1999).

WEEK 5: VISITING THE ASYLUM

CARDIFF CITY MENTAL HOSPITAL

******WEEK 6: READING WEEK******

Victorian psychology and allied approaches to mind

Psychiatry, neurology, and materialist approaches to mind

WEEK 7: INTRODUCTION TO VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Please read the following item:

See general reading list for Block 3.

- How did phrenology achieve such popularity?

Please read at least ONE of the following items:

WEEK 8: MESMERISM AND HYPNOSIS

MESMERISM AND HYPNOSIS

- Why were some Victorians attracted to mesmerism and hypnotism?

Please read the following TWO items:

WEEK 9: DEVIANCY AND DEGENERATION

Please read at least ONE of the following items:

CRIME AND PSYCHIATRY

- Why was criminal behaviour seen as evidence of degeneration?

Please read the following TWO items:

WEEK 10: DEVIANCY AND DEGENERATION

WEEK 6: READING WEEK

WEEK 6: READING WEEK