‘The Cruel Madness of Love’

Davis, Gayle

doi:10.1163/9789401206310

Cited by 121 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…GPI manifests itself in the tertiary stage of syphilis as "degenerative dementia" and "developing bodily paralysis." 61 Sybil passes the last days of her life bedridden after a long illness described as a developing paralysis with frequent attacks, during which she is in too much pain to receive guests. According to Gayle Davis, it was around fin de siècle that syphilis was established as the definitive cause of GPI, 62 but even decades before this discovery it was associated with "immoral lifestyle."…”

Section: The Best Is Simple Goodness Normal Standards Commonplacementioning

confidence: 99%

Entirely Fresh Influences in Edwardian Wildeana: Queerness in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Rose of Life (1905) and Julia Frankau’s The Sphinx’s Lawyer (1906)

Markovic

2019

Women's Writing

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Whereas Edwardian male-authored Wildeana tends to represent the Wildean character as a solipsistic bachelor, whose tarnished reputation could affect only his bachelor friends, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Rose of Life (1905) and Julia Frankau's The Sphinx 's Lawyer (1906) place the Wildean character within the family unit. This allows them to examine the consequences the character's legal prosecution and stigmatisation could have on his wife. Braddon's and Frankau's novels shift the focus from homoeroticism and homosexuality to the catalysing role male influence plays in the development of innate queerness. At the same time, they critically engage with the contemporary belief that female influence might "cure" queerness. Braddon and Frankau avoid demonising and/or oversimplifying the Wildean character's feelings and note that queerness and the family are by no means oppositional or antithetical units.To achieve this effect, they invariably sacrifice women's happiness, which allows us to read their novels as more anti-feminist than anti-queer.

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Section: The Best Is Simple Goodness Normal Standards Commonplacementioning

confidence: 99%

Entirely Fresh Influences in Edwardian Wildeana: Queerness in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Rose of Life (1905) and Julia Frankau’s The Sphinx’s Lawyer (1906)

Markovic

2019

Women's Writing

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“…Although the causative factors suggested for general paralysis were numerous, "most alienists … combined shared notions of debauchery and strain in their aetiological explanations of this disease." 142 The general paralytic patient possessed a body that quite literally liquefied and softened as a consequence of failed sexual vigilance or over-indulgence in alcohol. By the final years of the nineteenth century, the link between sexual behaviour and general paralysis was strongly suspected, but not definitively confirmed.…”

Section: Predisposition and Mental Diseasementioning

confidence: 99%

Fluid

Wallis

2017

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum

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FluidThis chapter considers the place of bodily fluids in the study of general paralysis, particularly cerebro spinal fluid (CSF) and urine. The study of the former was directly informed by postmortem evidence, which in turn fed into clinical interventions including trepanation. Though it did not lead to any breakthroughs in the systematic treatment or cure of general paralysis, trepanation was hotly debated by nineteenth-century practitioners both in terms of its efficacy and its ethical justifiability, and it is significant as an example of a physical operation that aimed to directly affect the brain. As the final chapter of the book, this chapter also brings us out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, when toxic theories of mental disease expanded upon existing work on the nature of general paralysis by suggesting that the condition was the result of toxins within the body. In studying the urine and other waste products of general paralytic patients, asylum researchers aimed to identify this toxin and thus the cause of general paralysis. During this investigative enterprise, the clinical picture of the condition as something often coincident with excessive drinking came to be reinforced by pathological findings that aligned the general paralytic body with that of the alcoholic. By the early twentieth century, laboratory-based studies had not eclipsed the social aspects of the disease, with significant attention still accorded to the role of heredity and the patient's personal history in the development of general paralysis.

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“…These earlier accounts also resonate with the kinds of disease etiologies that we might anticipate several decades later, particularly with regard to high rates of general paralysis and the physical decay that this disorder produced among patients, whose symptoms included convulsions and tremors and who often became bedridden. 59 In 1851 Prestwich was compelled to open its doors before the building was fully operational to move in 428 patients from Lancaster Asylum, Haydock Lodge and local workhouses, around one-tenth (45) of whom were suffering from general paralysis, “many in advanced stage,” 74 were subject to epilepsy and many afflicted with incurable diseases. 60 In 1854 Prestwich’s Medical Superintendent, Dr Joseph Holland, calculated that since it opened three years previously general paralysis had been responsible for 32 per cent of the institution’s mortality compared with 25 per cent in a selection of other English county asylums, which he attributed to the proximity of the asylum to Manchester.…”

Section: Management Of Irish Insanity In the Post-famine Yearsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 1887 the Medical Superintendent of Whittingham Asylum described the GP patient as degraded, broken down, demented, marked by shambling restlessness, has no mind left, filthy and dirty who “may be seen as long as even six or seven years in our wards before the closing scene occurs.” 113 It was also strongly associated with large manufacturing cities and decent wages which permitted excess and temptation in terms of alcohol and immoral activities. “The Irishman,” according to Clouston, “and Scotch Highlander need[ed] to come to the big towns or go to America to have the distinction of being able to acquire it.” 114…”

Section: Irish Insanity Degeneration and Despair 1870s-1880smentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cox

Marland²,

York³

2012

Journal of Social History

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Drawing on asylum reception orders, casebooks and annual reports, as well as County Council notebooks recording the settlement of Irish patients, this article examines a deeply traumatic and enduring aspect of the Irish migration experience, the confinement of large numbers of Irish migrants in the Lancashire asylum system between the 1850s and the 1880s. This period saw a massive influx of impoverished Irish into the county, particularly in the post-Famine years. Asylum superintendents commented on the impact of Irish patients in terms of resulting management problems in what became, soon after their establishment, overcrowded and overstretched asylums. The article examines descriptions of Irish patients, many of whom were admitted in a poor state of health. They were also depicted as violent and difficult to manage, though reporting of this may have been swayed by anti-Irish sentiment. The article suggests that a hardening of attitudes took place in the 1870s and 1880s, when theories of degeneration took hold and the Irish in Ireland exhibited exceptionally high rates of institutionalization. It points to continuities across this period: the ongoing association between mental illness and migration long after the massive Famine influx had abated, and claims that the Irish, at one and the same time referred to as volatile and vulnerable, were particularly susceptible to the challenges of urban life, marked by their intemperance, liability to general paralysis, turbulence and immorality. Asylum superintendents also noted the relative isolation of the Irish, which led to their long-term incarceration. The article suggests that commentary about Irish asylum patients provides traction in considering broader perceptions of the Irish body, mobility and Irishness in nineteenth-century England, and a deeper understanding of institutionalization.This case (an Irishman who, after an injury to the head from a gunshot wound received during the Indian mutiny, had annihilated his reason by excessive drinking) was a typical case of a class which is unfortunately very numerous in this Asylum, in which a condition of extreme bodily and mental weakness is combined with the most bellicose propensities. 1 Over the course of the last two centuries Irish people have been depicted as particularly prone to mental illness, associated in the late twentieth century with high rates of depression and schizophrenia, alcohol and drug-related conditions, and psychiatric hospital admissions. 2 High rates of mental breakdown have been observed in both the Irish who remained at home and those who migrated overseas. While historical scholarship has produced an impressive volume of research and literature on the experiences of Irish migrants and the "Irish problem" in nineteenth-century Britain, 3 it is only recently that this has come to focus on what one historian of Irish psychiatry has described as one of the "most traumatic aspects" of Irish migration, the high incidence of mental breakdown and

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‘The Cruel Madness of Love’

Cited by 121 publications

References 14 publications

Entirely Fresh Influences in Edwardian Wildeana: Queerness in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Rose of Life (1905) and Julia Frankau’s The Sphinx’s Lawyer (1906)

Entirely Fresh Influences in Edwardian Wildeana: Queerness in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Rose of Life (1905) and Julia Frankau’s The Sphinx’s Lawyer (1906)

Fluid

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

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