Migration, family structure and pauper lunacy in Victorian England: admissions to the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1845–1900

Abstract

The lunatic asylum remains one of the most remarkable institutional monuments of the modern world, dominating the social landscape of Victorian Britain and exercising a powerful attraction for social historians of medicine, an attraction almost as great as the spectre of the madhouse for contemporary novelists. Our image of the Victorian asylum is still pervaded to a surprising degree by the gloomy spectacle of the total institution presented by Michel Foucault, though it has been modified by a whole range of institutional and philosophical accounts undertaken in the past three decades. Pioneering studies by researchers such as Andrew Scull have illuminated not only the power exercised by the new asylum superintendents, armed with medical discourses of moral treatment and the early promise of curability, but also the continuing dominance of the ‘mad doctors’ in the sombre years of neo-Darwinian pessimism and eugenics doctrines. More recent contributions to the now enormous literature on the social history of insanity have shifted the focus of attention from earlier concerns with charting the rise of the asylum and the elaboration of medical discourses under the psychiatric gaze of physicians to a detailed reconstruction of the social environment of the asylum and especially to the interplay between familial circumstances and the way institutions responded to the insane. Such concerns were also clearly evident in important earlier studies by Walton, Scull, Digby and others, which drew on fundamental work by Anderson on the changing role of the family during industrialization. These scholars drew attention to the importance of family and kinship relations in the negotiation of a lunatic's passage to the Victorian asylum, as well as the role of wider forces of economic change, population growth and migration in shaping the environment in which decisions about the care of the mad were made.

The emergence of social gaps in mental health: A longitudinal population study in Sweden, 1900-1959

“…In a pioneering work from 1855, Jarvis finds that poverty was associated with lunacy in Massachusetts, suggesting that lunacy causes poverty [25]. Similar associations are found for incarceration rates at 19th-century British asylums [9,26,27]. In the 1930s, Faris and Dunham found an ecological connection in Chicago, according to which people from poor neighbourhoods ran higher risks of hospitalisation than others [28].…”

“…Due to the longitudinal design, our findings imply that the social causation mechanism did not contribute to the inverse relationship until the 1940s, in the sample population. Previous research on historical populations using treated samples show the expected inverse relationship [9,[25][26][27][28]. These conflicting results suggest that downward social drift had a greater impact on SES inequalities in mental health in the 19th-century than social causation mechanisms.…”

Supply or demand? Institutionalization of the mentally ill in the emerging Swedish welfare state, 1900–59

“…However, the findings of empirical studies have been mixed. Adair et al (1997) found an association between lunacy and strong family ties, and also with low mobility of populations, which is characterized by rural contexts and traditional extended, strong family systems. Miller (2007) shows that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, areas of England with higher levels of industrialization and assumed weaker family ties did not have higher rates of insanity, and instead the trend was in the reverse direction.…”

“…The increased dependency on wage labour made the labour market more competitive, and meant that more and more individuals with limited working abilities had no support (Scull, 1979). The reliance on wages and a trend towards family nuclearization were also expected to reduce the practical possibilities of families taking care of mentally-ill relatives (Adair et al, 1997; Baur, 2013; Miller, 2007; Walton, 1979; Wright, 1998). Thus, the growth of institutions can be seen as a response to increased demand for care (Wright, 1997).…”

Emaciated, Exhausted, and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Late Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums

“…10 More recently, the impact of migration, internal and transnational, on these institutions has also attracted serious historical study. 11 Much of this work has focused on North America and the Antipodes, contexts which were notable for the high proportion of Irish admissions. 12 In mid-nineteenth-century Newfoundland, for example, Irish-born migrants made up over 40 per cent of the intake to a provisional asylum set up to cope with the sudden rise in mental illness; in Nova Scotia asylum Irish-born patients constituted 19 per cent of admissions even though they only accounted for 3 per cent of the general population.…”