Forcible Feeding of the Insane

Insane In The Membrane: Arguing Against The Forcible Medication of Mentally Ill Pre-Trial Defendants

‘ A Prostitution of the Profession ’ ? Forcible Feeding , Prison Doctors , Suffrage and the British State , 1909 – 1914

Historians have castigated the British medical profession for endorsing forcible feeding during the suffragette hunger strike campaigns of 1909 to 1914. This article reconsiders the importance of medical opposition to forcible feeding by closely analysing its agendas and, importantly, by positing that the medico-ethical debates sparked in that period set the stage for ethical discourses that ha...

General Paralysis of the Insane

It is a singular fact that, notwithstanding the deeply interesting nature of the subject, only one monograph on the General Paralysis of the Insane (the treatise by Dr. Winn) has appeared in this country; whilst on the continent, not less than five monographs have been published during the last thirty years. Dr. Winn's treatise, published in 1848, and previously printed as an original article i...

The bones of the insane

This article examines alienist explanations for fracture among British asylum patients in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. A series of deaths in asylums came to light in the 1870s which, in placing the blame for such incidents on asylum staff, called for a response from the psychiatric profession. This response drew upon other medical fields and employed novel pathological tech...

Insane Delusions