[HPY28(1)]
Article
Liberty and the individual: the colony asylum in Scotland and England
Gillian AllmondQueen's University Belfast
Corresponding author:Gillian Allmond, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. Email: gallmond01@qub.ac.uk 2
AbstractThis paper analyses the buildings, spaces and interiors of Bangour Village public asylum for the insane, near Edinburgh, and compares these with an English asylum, Whalley, near Preston, of similar early-twentieth-century date. The village asylum, which developed from a European tradition of rendering the poor productive through 'colonisation', was more enthusiastically and completely adopted in Scotland than in England, perhaps due to differences in asylum culture within the two jurisdictions.'Liberty' and 'individuality', in particular, were highly valued within Scottish asylum discourses, arguably shaping material provision for the insane poor from the scale of the buildings to the quality of the furnishings. The English example shows, by contrast, a greater concern with security and hygiene. These two differing interpretations show a degree of flexibility within the internationalized asylum model which is seldom recognized in the literature.
At Kingseat Asylum near Aberdeen, in 1901-1904, asylum authorities constructed an asylum which appears to resemble Ebenezer Howard's schematic diagram of a garden city 'ward'. Using theories of the relationship between spatial rationalities and governmentality, this paper asks whether Howard's garden city could plausibly have been a model for the Kingseat Asylum layout. The historiographical orthodoxy, which claims that late nineteenth-century asylums were little more than 'warehouses' to sequester the unwanted, is problematized and the existence is postulated of a distinct Scottish asylum culture which was alarmed by the tendency to asylum growth, overcrowding and disease in England and elsewhere. Garden city reformers and asylum builders faced similar problems in terms of overcrowding and disease, and were both concerned about the 'aggregation' of the poor and their consequent loss of individuality. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Scottish asylum builders, in particular, rejected the increasingly large monolithic style of asylum in favour of dispersed 'village' style settlements. Aberdeen asylum authorities may have sought to access the symbolic resonance of the garden city layout and its utopian qualities as a 'marriage' of town and country, health and industry, variety and uniformity. The garden city asylum also points to a spectrum of opinion relating to the therapeutic role of environment in relation to mental illness and suggests that 'hard hereditarian' approaches were less influential, at least in Scotland, than is sometimes claimed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.