Victorian Lunacy

Victorian Lunacy Synopsis

Using the career of Richard M. Bucke at the London Asylum in Canada as its focus, this 1986 book explores the theory and practice of late nineteenth-century psychiatry. The study describes the medical context that nurtured Victorian alienists, while their professional sphere - the asylum - is considered as an autonomous social community, often at odds with the intentions of its ostensible masters. Psychiatric theory is discussed less as an objective body of biomedical knowledge than as a product of the social turmoil that characterized the final decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike many other studies of nineteenth-century psychiatry, this book does not restrict itself to a single national experience, but adopts an explicitly Anglo-American perspective. Rather than restricting attention to political or institutional factors, it accords major significance to the role of ideas in determining the character of late Victorian psychiatry.