Introductory description

The 30 CATS final-year undergraduate module will utilise secondary literature and a selection of primary (including online) sources to explore the relationship between madness and society from the 18th century to the present day. A major focus of the module will be the rise of institutional approaches to the treatment of mental disorder from 18th-century ‘mad-houses’ to asylums governed according to the dictates of moral management, and then towards the end of the 19th century vast establishments ‘silted’ up with ‘chronic’ long-term patients. The module is largely centred on British sources, but includes material on North America, France, and colonial settings.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. The Madness of King George: A Turning Point in Attitudes to Mental Disorder?
2. Mind Forg’d Manacles: Madness in the 18th Century
3. The Trade in Lunacy: Private Asylums in the 18th Century
4. Reform, Moral Management and the York Retreat
5. Spaces of Confinement: The Asylum as Utopia in the 19th Century
6. Foucault’s Great Confinement of the Insane
7. The Female Malady? Madness and Gender
8. Psychiatry and the ‘Manufacture of Madness’
9. Race, Colonial and Madness
10. Ethnicity, Migration and Mental Illness
11. Shattered Nerves
12. Themes of Degeneration
13. The Patient’s View
14. Discourses, Therapies and Conflict: How to Heal the Mind in the 20th Century
15. Male Hysteria: From Shell-Shock to Combat Exhaustion
16. ‘Outside the Walls of the Asylum’: Anti-Psychiatry to Care in the Community

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the relationship between madness and society from the 18th century to the present day, including lay and medical responses to mental disorder, based on scientific, cultural, intellectual and popular ideas and influences
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources (including psychiatric texts, case notes, asylum archives, legal records, the reports of reformers and Lunacy Commissioners, novels, art, photography, film and patient narratives) relating to the historical controversies surrounding the study of madness
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, relating to the history of mental disorder.
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to the history of mental disorder

Indicative reading list

• Roy Porter, ‘Psychiatry’, in idem, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: Harper Collins, 1997), pp. 493-524.
• Roy Porter, ‘Mental Illness’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 278-303.
• Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
• Andrew Scull, Madness: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Michael Neve, ‘Medicine and the Mind’, in Irvine Loudon (ed.), Western Medicine: An Illustrated History (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 232-48.
• Joan Lane, A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750-1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), ch. 6 ‘Asylums and Prisons’.
• Jack D. Pressman, ‘Concepts of Mental Illness in the West’, in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Diseases (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 59-84.
• Peter Elmer, ‘The Care and Cure of Mental Illness’, in Peter Elmer (ed.), The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe (Manchester University Press, with the Open University, 2004), pp. 228-56.
• Peter Elmer and Ole Peter Grell (eds), Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500- 1800: A Source Book (Manchester University Press, with the Open University, 2004), Part 9 ‘The Care and Cure of the Insane in Early Modern Europe’, pp. 231-55.
• Jonathan Andrews, ‘The Rise of the Asylum in Britain’, in Deborah Brunton (ed.), Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1800-1930 (Manchester University Press, with the Open University, 2004), pp. 298-330.
• Deborah Brunton (ed.), Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1800-1930 (Manchester University Press, with the Open University, 2004), Part 11 ‘The Growth of the Asylum’, pp. 229-53.
• Peter Bartlett and David Wright (eds), Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community 1750-2000 (London: Athlone, 1999).
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock, 1967). (Available in paperback)
• Allan Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool University Press, 1998). (Available in paperback)
• Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800-1914 (London and New York, 1999).
• Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (eds), The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845-1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, Phoenix 1996). (Available in paperback)
• Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone, 1987; Penguin edn, 1990).
• See also Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), which is an illustrated version of Mind- Forg’d Manacles. (Available in paperback)
• Roy Porter (ed.), The Faber Book of Madness (London: Faber and Faber, 1991, 1993). (Available in paperback)
• Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015).
• Andrew Scull (ed.), Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (London: Athlone, 1981).
• Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of All Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 (Yale University Press, 1993) (Available in paperback)
• Andrew Scull, The Insanity of Place/The Place of Insanity: Essays on the History of Psychiatry (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1997). (Decent though ‘biased’ overview; available in paperback)
• G.E. Berrios, A History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology since the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1996). A useful guide to the language and symptoms of psychiatry, written by a psychiatrist-historian.
• G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (eds), 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841-1991 (London: Althone, 1991). An out-of-print collection of useful essays.
• Hugh Freeman and German Berrios (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, Vol. II: the Aftermath (London: Athlone, 1996).
• Richard A. Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1535- 1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Old and somewhat dated, but still useful, and a mine of information.
• M.S. Micale and Roy Porter (eds), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 1994). Packed with useful essays, particularly strong on historiography.
• Edward Shorter, A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2005) (Library reference section)
• Michael H. Stone, Healing the Mind: A History of Psychiatry from Antiquity to the Present (London: Pimlico, 1998).
• Wellcome Library
• http://wellcomelibrary.org (for access to Wellcome catalogue and Wellcome images. The Wellcome Library also has many e-books, digitised sources and a moving image collection (e.g. films on shell-shock). For those who can visit in person, it holds many archival resources and is a wonderful place to work. There is a huge ongoing digitisation project, the Digitised Mental Health Care archive, which has made the records of e.g. Ticehurst, Manor House Asylum, and the York Retreat available, as well as the archives of prominent psychiatrists, the Mental After Care Association, and MIND.
• Via Warwick University Library
• Medical journals (e-journals): includes Lancet, British Medical Journal (BMJ) ( also available via JSTOR), Journal of Mental Science and many others
• Newspapers - include The Times and many other large circulation newspapers though the years covered vary greatly. Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers, a collection of provincial newspapers which include reports on local asylums, court cases involving insanity plea, etc.
• Databases include British Periodicals online (a huge range of periodical literature, general interest journals with numerous articles on mental health, asylums, etc) from the late seventeenth-century to the twentieth; ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line); Dictionary of National Biography (for information on 'famous' figures e.g. John Conolly, Henry Maudsley); House of Commons Parliamentary Papers - a useful guide to this source is to be found on the Centre for the History of Medicine website (Warwick) http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/events/ass/hcpp-handout.pdf (material on asylums, inquiries, legislation, Lunacy Commissioners and Board) and Old Bailey on-line.

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.