Introduction: histories of asylums, insanity and psychiatry in Scotland

Abstract

This paper introduces a special issue on ‘Histories of asylums, insanity and psychiatry in Scotland’, situating the papers that follow in an outline historiography of work in this field. Using Allan Beveridge’s claims in 1993 about the relative lack of research on the history of psychiatry in Scotland, the paper reviews a range of contributions that have emerged since then, loosely distinguishing between ‘overviews’ – work addressing longer-term trends and broader periods and systems – and more detailed studies of particular ‘individuals and institutions’. There remains much still to do, but the present special issue signals what is currently being achieved, not least by a new generation of scholars in and on Scotland.

The invisible woman: Susan Carnegie and Montrose Lunatic Asylum

“…To be fair, historical scholarship on Scottish psychiatry has been lacking, so much so that History of Psychiatry recently dedicated a special issue to help fill the void. Its contents went beyond a regional interest in Scottish psychiatry; according to the editors, each paper ‘widens into concerns, implications and challenges that rebound beyond Scotland to illuminate much larger terrains of asylums, insanity and psychiatry (past, present and future)’ (Philo and Andrews, 2017: 4). Research on Carnegie is part of a larger history of women in psychiatry which focuses on women as agents-of-change rather than patients.…”

Historical geography III: Hope persists

“…Yet the ghosts often refer to the forgotten, the silent and the marginalised, to their absence in the records or written histories. 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.…”