Asylums and Authors

The Result of Trials of Sodium Hydnocarpate and Sodium Morrhuate in Thirteen Indian Leper Asylums

The experiment was carried out in a large number of the asylums and reports have been received from 13 of these. The reports received from two other asylums were so incomplete as to be of no use in determining the results. Sir Leonard Rogers asked me to classify and report on the results as shown in the various reports. The asylums where the experiment was carried out were the following (that i...

Asylums and Authors

It has brought out the evolution of mental institutions over time, and various authors’ depictions of the same. The author has chosen to start the narrative from 1868 (Hard Cash, by Charles Reade), and has traced the same till 1962 (One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, Ken Kesey) in the international arena. However, the review could have looked into works published beyond 1962. Further, there appea...

Dysentery in English Asylums and Jails

An Effective Model of Institutional Taxation: Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth-Century England

The compulsory establishment of large public lunatic asylums under Act of parliament in the nineteenth century to address the enormous increase in the number of the insane raised legal and practical challenges in relation to their status within the law of tax. As a result of their therapeutic and custodial objectives, these novel institutions required extensive landed property and very specific...

Erving Goffman's Asylums 50 years on.

Erving Goffman's Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates is a key text in the sociology of mental illness. It is sometimes seen simplistically as a paradigm of'antipsychiatry', and as a key step in the triumph of community psychiatry over narrower, medical models of mental illness. Reading Asylums today, however, reveals that this portrayal does not capture ...