A ‘Scottish Poor Law of Lunacy’? Poor Law, Lunacy Law and Scotland’s parochial asylums

Abstract

Scotland's parochial asylums are unfamiliar institutional spaces. Representing the concrete manifestation of the collision between two spheres of legislation, the Poor Law and the Lunacy Law, six such asylums were constructed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These sites expressed the enduring mandate of the Scottish Poor Law 1845 over the domain of 'madness'. They were institutions whose very existence was fashioned at the directive of the local arm of the Poor Law, the parochial board, and they constituted a continuing 'Scottish Poor Law of Lunacy'. Their origins and operation significantly subverted the intentions and objectives of the Lunacy Act 1857, the aim of which had been to institute a public district asylum network with nationwide coverage.

Historical geography III: Hope persists

“…Work detailing the geographical histories of psychiatry, particularly in Scotland, enatils an attempt to bring the most neglected of society to the fore across a range of different scales (Philo and Andrews, 2017). From Farquharson's (2017) investigations into the unfamiliar institutions of Scotland's parochial asylums in the nineteenth century, Gallagher's (2017) careful tracking of the emergence of mental patient unionism in the early 1970s, through to McGeachan's (2017) portrait of patient-artist Adam Christie in the early twentieth century, a focus on the neglected and the unknown is deliberately given precedence. John Forrester and Laura Cameron (2017) also turn to the psydisciplines to reveal the neglected or 'unusual' geographies and histories of psychoanalysis.…”